Hello, readers. First, I have some recommendations:
1) The Booth at the End, ten twenty-minute episodes on Hulu. I think the first season (that is, the first five episodes) was (were) better, but they’re both very interesting treatments of the question, “How far are you willing to go?”
1.1) Along the same vein, I thought the Nashville premier was pretty good, but this may be because I think Hayden Panettiere is cute. I don’t think it was all that, though.
2) My completed after-action report for the tutorial scenario in hyper-grognard Second World War wargame Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge.
3) A Time for Trumpets, a treatment of the Battle of the Bulge by Charles B. MacDonald, who is a historian and was commander of a rifle company during that last gasp of the German war machine. If you have any suggestions for other good Battle of the Bulge/Siege of Bastogne books, leave a comment (although the tumbleweeds rolling by down in the comments section make me look a bit optimistic in saying this).
4) A Lee-Enfield rifle of some description. This is a recommendation of a different sort than the others, but if you are a collector of firearms, a fan of history from the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, or nostalgic for an era when British engineering was actually worth something, it’s one to obtain.
With those out of the way, I can gab about some miscellaneous Many Words-related things. First, ‘many’, for the narrow purpose of modifying ‘words’ in the title of this website, now means north of 100,000, though by how much I am not certain1. Considering how long I’ve been going, that’s not particularly impressive, although it is notable as the original target length for the fantasy story I have basically abandoned.
Second, a word to the people who have arrived here from Web Fiction Guide. Although anyone who uses Google Analytics knows how easy it is to get approximate locations from people who consent to being tracked2, it would be very, very creepy for me to call you out by location, so I’ll settle for the somewhat less creepy hello, welcome, enjoy the archives, curse my semi-regular updates, and I know where you live3.
Third, and less directly Many Words-related, I’ve taken on a new code project. Fleet-Command-alike tactical naval warfare strategy game Naval War: Arctic Circle shipped without a random scenario generator, which is something I am in the process of correcting. It’s been an interesting programming exercise so far, with some math thrown in (I know orthographic projections now). I am proud to say that, in the sleuthing required to discover which particular point on the globe was the one that NWAC’s developers chose as the origin for their projection, I was faster than my math grad student friend4.
That’s all for now. Today I’m hoping to get up to the shooting range, for to fully exercise the rapid-fire capabilities of the Lee-Enfield, but it depends on what I can get done and what the weather’s like.
1. Some of my early writing is in .odt, rather than raw text, and wc doesn’t know how to handle that. Or rather, it does, but it massively inflates the counts, so I don’t include them in my word-counting script.
2. And by ‘consent to being tracked’, I mean ‘fail to disable tracking scripts’.
3. Again, only roughly. If it’s any consolation, there’s probably enough information floating around the Internet to find out exactly who I am and nearly-exactly where I live, if you don’t like being at a disadvantage. Not that I would mind if you decided not to track me down. After all, that would be creepy.
4. Granted, he was doing other things.
