(no subject)
Feb. 14th, 2011 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI'm awake and I'm at work. I did not actually get any exercise done this weekend; I will be attempting Week 6, Day 1 this afternoon before trying the stairs and/or going home. I say 'trying' because I looked at Week 6, Day 1, Column 3- which is where I placed after my exhaustion test- and made the WAT face. If I can actually do Week 6, Day 1, Column 3 today, I'm not entirely certain I'm going to want to slug it up the stairs afterwards.
I'm almost done with Survival City. I've got several atomic-themed books lined up afterward but to be honest this is one of those subjects that is probably best spaced with other things just to avoid having to make too many SAN rolls. Seriously, about every three or four pages of discussion about the Cold War industrial/military mindset and its effect on architecture, city planning, strategic planning, every day life, etc. I'm seized with the urge to pick up the phone, call one of my uncles who grew up in the 1950s, and tell them 'thank you for your generation not destroying the world'. What's really kind of disturbing is just how much I'm reading of the advertising and newspaper writing of the 1950s and 1960s that makes me realize holy God, Fallout wasn't making this crap up. If you've got Fallout 3 on hand, load the game up, get on over to the Museum of Technology, and walk through the Vault-Tec exhibit. Every time you start hearing a canned voice over the speakers, stop and listen. Every time you see an object you can interact with in some way (other than trash on the floor), do so and listen to the accompanying spiel. When I first played through I found the combination of cheerful and doomsday tones ironic and exaggerated. It's not. That's exactly what people were thinking like at the time- not everybody, obviously, but the people pushing constant security against the invisible threat...
Anyway, yeah, I don't think it's good for me to go from Survival City straight to reading Project Orion or The Atomic Times: My H-Bomb Year at the Pacific Proving Ground. Maybe a biography of Mel Blanc or Jim Henson or Mel Brooks or something. Then it's back to the ka-splodey.
I'm almost done with Survival City. I've got several atomic-themed books lined up afterward but to be honest this is one of those subjects that is probably best spaced with other things just to avoid having to make too many SAN rolls. Seriously, about every three or four pages of discussion about the Cold War industrial/military mindset and its effect on architecture, city planning, strategic planning, every day life, etc. I'm seized with the urge to pick up the phone, call one of my uncles who grew up in the 1950s, and tell them 'thank you for your generation not destroying the world'. What's really kind of disturbing is just how much I'm reading of the advertising and newspaper writing of the 1950s and 1960s that makes me realize holy God, Fallout wasn't making this crap up. If you've got Fallout 3 on hand, load the game up, get on over to the Museum of Technology, and walk through the Vault-Tec exhibit. Every time you start hearing a canned voice over the speakers, stop and listen. Every time you see an object you can interact with in some way (other than trash on the floor), do so and listen to the accompanying spiel. When I first played through I found the combination of cheerful and doomsday tones ironic and exaggerated. It's not. That's exactly what people were thinking like at the time- not everybody, obviously, but the people pushing constant security against the invisible threat...
Anyway, yeah, I don't think it's good for me to go from Survival City straight to reading Project Orion or The Atomic Times: My H-Bomb Year at the Pacific Proving Ground. Maybe a biography of Mel Blanc or Jim Henson or Mel Brooks or something. Then it's back to the ka-splodey.
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Date: 2011-02-14 05:33 pm (UTC)If you don't mind another atomic-themed book to add to the pile whenever you're in the mood for it, I'd be happy to send you my copy of Peter Hennessy's The Secret State, which is all about British civil defence and nuclear deterrence (such as it was) and the author's exploration of TURNSTILE, the now-decommissioned bunker in the Cotswolds meant to serve as the British government's command post in the event of things going to hell. (Hennessy's just come out with an updated edition, so it'll give me an excuse to buy it and pass on my old copy to someone who might be interested!)
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Date: 2011-02-14 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 07:58 pm (UTC)"Surprisingly enough, according to [C.E. Wood,] this former U.S. Marine and soldier, mud has little presence in the professional literature of war. In ordinary soldiers' memoirs, by contrast, mud is an intimate and annoying presence, and these sources are consequently salient in Wood's investigation of mud's role in combat history."
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Date: 2011-02-14 08:27 pm (UTC)Which says interesting ways about the way that my mind works.
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Date: 2011-02-14 08:28 pm (UTC)