Chris Baer

James Bond Will Return in . . . a New Cover

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The Penguin Blog, the “house” blog of Penguin Books UK, brings news of a cover re-vamp for the hardback Ian Fleming James Bond novels (“Covering Bond“):

The centenary of Fleming’s birth was clearly a good time to revisit the Bonds and cover them in a package that says, yes these are fun, but also makes it implicit that there’s no reason not to take them seriously. Most importantly, they should look like books worth owning.

I’m not entirely sold on the Bond novels as literature, but there’s no denying their importance to modern culture. And indeed, the books’ series design presents a refined style that helps capture the brutally sensualist spirit of the books (which never devolved into the campiness of the 1970’s and -80’s film iterations). These books would look good on any shelf, regardless of the books on either side.

Spines of new Penguin Bonds; image from The Penguin Blog at http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/the_penguin_blog/2008/05/covering-bond.html

The Penguin Blog has a larger front cover illustrations of each of the novels as well, striking vignettes of femmes fatale in a single color palette. Bond is back, in style.

Plus, who knew Penguin Books had a blog? Another feed for the reader.

(via Daring Fireball)

Wargaming Inside: Intel’s Corporate Wargames

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Tim Casey, at the Intel IT group’s blog reports on their experiences using wargaming to simulate and understand enterprise-level security threats and presents the resulting white paper (“Wargames: Serious Play that Tests Enterprise Assumptions,” .pdf).

One of Casey’s colleagues at Intel attended the Naval War College‘s 2002 “Digital Pearl Harbor” wargame and came away impressed:

So we decided to stage something similar at Intel, but focusing on the attacker viewpoint rather than the defenders. Although this is somewhat different than a classical war game, we kept the basic process (and the name “war game”) to keep it different from other risk assessment methods. It wasn’t easy to come up with our own game. At the time, there was very little about war gaming that wasn’t based on military objectives, and it was almost all from the defender’s point of view.

What strikes me, in reading both the article and the white paper, is the process of defining “war gaming,” both linguistically and procedurally.

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Bill Lyon on the Flyers

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Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer plays host to a great column by the retired Bill Lyon on the current second round NHL playoff series between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Montreal Canadiens.

It’s not excessively objective, but neither is it a “homer” screed; it’s just a very good piece of hockey journalism that manages to recap last night’s game with style:

Goalies are not fair game, no matter how far they roam. But Downie cannot resist. He aims for the goalie’s legs and, using his stick like an oversized spatula, he flips Price. The Canadiens take outraged exception, and the Flyers must retaliate, of course, so soon the ice is littered with gloves and sticks, and unkind things are being said about ancestry. The population of the penalty box goes up by four.

Orange Out, on flickr.com, by MattP33, via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License
Perhaps I’d like the column less if I were a fan of Les Habitants, but I hope not. It’s simply good sports writing, so rare these days and rarer still since Lyon’s retirement a few years back.

(Image courtesy of MattP33 via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License.)

Becoming One with Blake’s 7

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Over on science fiction mega-blog-site io9.com, there’s a recent article on “How to Get into Rebel Space Opera Blake’s 7” that addresses the emotional and psychological aspects of attuning yourself to this slightly quirky show’s worldview:

Be willing to suspend your disbelief a bit in the first season. Blake and his crew have a run of good luck that’s pretty hard to swallow, including stumbling on the greatest spaceship in known space and later inheriting the most awesome computer ever built. Just run with it, because it sets up some great stories later.

Blake's Seven 7” single back cover, on Flickr.com, by Unloveable, via a Creative Commons Attribution licence

Yet another of Terry Nation‘s creations, Blake’s 7 does take some getting used to, as the heroes, broadly taken, are really anti-heroes determined to overthrow the oppressive Federation at pretty much any cost. It’s widely considered one of the very first of the “arc” science-fiction shows that focus on character development over a pre-planned story line (like Babylon 5), rather than being purely episodic in nature, where one episode’s events have little if anything to do with the next (like the original Star Trek).

The io9 article does not, however, address how to actually get Blake’s 7 in DVD Region 1 countries, as they have not been released with our region coding, other than a wink and nod at the torrent route in the comments. Region 2 has the full series, and both PAL and NTSC video tapes were produced. As far back as 2004, there were plans to produce Region 1 DVDs, but there is very little information available about why the deal or project fell through. Some sites claim to have region free versions of the show on DVD for sale, but you don’t have to be Orac to realize that there’s something strange going on there.

I realize that Blake’s 7 will always be a niche show in the United States, and it’s certainly the rights holders’ prerogative to not find a way to take my money, but it would be a shame to have this unique show stuck in the proverbial film can for American fans.

(Image courtesy of Unloveable via a Creative Commons Attribution License.)

What's in a Name?: Team Names and Fan Development in the Indian Premier League

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So, you decide to spend millions of dollars (or many, many, many crore of rupees, in this case) to launch a franchise-based professional cricket league in India. Let’s call it the Indian Premier League, since all top-flight leagues these days are premier.

Indian Premier League. Now with more Premier.

Eight teams based in eight regions, with international stars and a good portion of the national cricket team scattered amongst the league. These players previously were identified with the national team, and much of the country cheered for all of them, as a single team. For league play, though, you need people identifying with their “own” team.

How do you get people to form a deep (and therefore lucrative) affiliation with their regional team and root against their national team heroes? This duality of fan loyalty poses an issue for all sports with the club/country split (as is most often seen in soccer), but particularly for a sport like cricket that, in India, has mostly been focused on international play.

The answer? Cheerleaders imported from America. Oh, and spiffy team names.

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Single Player: B-29 Superfortress

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It’s something of Air Combat Week here at Movement Point, as we take a first look at Khyber Pass Games‘ newly published solitaire wargame, B-29 Superfortress: Bombers over Japan, 1944-1945 (2008).

Following solidly in the footsteps (airstream?) of Avalon Hill’s B-17: Queen of the Skies (1983; originally from On Target Games, 1981) solitaire game of bomber missions over Axis-occupied Europe, KPG’s B-29 challenges the solo gamer with the task of shepherding a Superfortress and its crew on 35 missions against Imperial Japanese targets in the Pacific. And just as the B-29 was a far more complex beast than the B-17, so too does this new game add to the complexities of its antecedent. The chart and tables book comes in at forty pages, covering such minutia as celestial navigation and engineer instrument damage tables. B-17, by contrast, contains fewer than ten pages of charts and tables.

Cross-reference, check, roll, apply, and move on.

Complexity in a wargame can be a double-edged sword. There are people who live for chrome in their rules, but quite often, games that add layer upon layer of complexity wind up as “shelf queens,” destined to gather dust and the occasional comment from a visiting gamer friend to the effect of, “Oh, yeah, I have that game, too. Never did play it. Looks cool, though!”

However, in a solitaire game, complexity can often mask, or at least minimize, the sense that you’re merely rolling dice to see what happens. One of the real knocks against B-17 is that the limited number of decision points the solo player encounters reduce the game to a dice rolling exercise—you might as well just roll the dice once: 2-6, you win; 7-9, you draw; 10-12 you lose.

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