As someone expecting a child with zero real experience with children, Future Daddy is a solid book. I appreciated the practical 8 step guides to things like "this is how to change a diaper" and "this is how to give your child a bath."

It's both a strength and weakness that a lot of this advice is aimed at people who are, bluntly, less mature than I am. If you're in your early 20s, working an unstable job, and not sure how serious things are with your now pregnant girlfriend, yeah, absolutely do everything to get your metaphorical house in order before the child shows up, because you don't want to mess this up. However, if you're married, in a career, and have gone to therapy, the advice is probably stuff you're already doing.

But on the whole, pragmatic, short, and unobjectionable.

Robert Komer was the first director of CORDS in 1967 and 68, an ad hoc counter-insurgency program focus on rural pacification most notorious for the Phoenix Program series of extrajudicial killings. In this provocatively titled white paper, written after the Easter Offensive of 1972 and the leak of the Pentagon Papers, Komer makes a set of linked arguments about pacification and counter-insurgency that boil down to "too little, too late, by agencies that didn't care."

A read of high level policy documents in the Pentagon Paper reveal that those in charge: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, recognized the importance of rural pacification. Somewhere between D.C. and the Mekong delta, that emphasis faded away. Komer argues that there was never any unified counter-insurgency command, and in the absence of this unity of effort in country, agencies did what they traditionally did. State treated the government of South Vietnam like a stable sovereign partner nation, though it manifestly was not. The US Army focused on The Big War, high-tech search and destroy, and relegated counter-insurgency to a backwater. Pacification was never more than 10% of the billions of dollars spent annually.

Komer makes several suggestions for what should have been done. The ambassador should have been given proconsul authority over all military and civilian efforts in the war (and in Laos and Cambodia as well). Ad hoc organizations blending personnel from more durable agencies are effective, if properly supported. The US needed to use its leverage over aid to remove corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese officials and officers, and damn the charges of colonialism.

This book is a good precise of counter-insurgency thinking circa 1972, but has obviously been superseded by events. Komer is biased towards what he did at CORDS, but not so much so to dismiss his conclusions. The problems are two-fold. From a scholarly perspective, "institutional constraints" is a handwave to explain why the Army, State, the CIA, etc all failed so comprehensively. And from a content perspective, I still have no idea what it would actually be like to go up river and wage the kind of pacification war that Komer wanted, to take some bright American kid (~25 years old) and make them the next best thing to God in a foreign province.

How many years have we been adventurers? Delving into darkness, slaying found fiends and retrieving treasure to increase our heroic power. Sure, sometimes we might be more mercenary murderhobos than actual heroes, but roleplaying games are about adventure. Well, not any more!



Wicked Ones is a Forged in the Dark game about being the monsters. You are creatures of unusual ambition and intelligence, ruling over a dungeon populated by lesser minions and imps. You argue, scheme, develop dark plans, and venture out onto the surface to raid and corrupt the forces of Light that are prevent you from fulfilling your monstrous destiny. As your dungeon grows, you attract adventurers who murder their way towards your sanctum. But if you survive, you'll topple the whole region into chaos, claiming it for the forces of darkness.

Wicked Ones gets a lot of points for the reverse dungeon concept, but it's also a really nicely tuned version of the FitD system. Monsters are resilient, so they clear stress and harm automatically. There's a new level of consequence, Shocked, which imposes a penalty to the next roll using the relevant ability. Downtime and the loot cycle have also been reworked to be more monstrous, and you can bank Dark Hearts to get bonus dice by playing into moments when your monstrous appetites harm you. Resistance rolls have been reworked into a static cost. In general, having read a fair number of FitD games, Wicked Ones is one of the better implementations of the system, a clear and stripped down FitD 1.5!

The book comes with plenty of material, with three schools of magic, alchemy, and goblincore mad science to flavor the usual abilities. There are four sample regions to corrupt, lots of tables of weird items and spells, four advanced monsters with powerful abilities, and plenty of incredibly stylish artwork. The tone is horror-slapstick. You're encouraged to commit atrocities, but fiction and your base appetites will implode your plans in a funny way.

There aren't many games in this vein, and Wicked Ones is a cut above. My only problem is that it came out after my Monstrous Revolution campaign was in full swing. Maybe next time!

Vietnam War memoirs have a pretty similar structure, imposed by the facts of history. Here's a young kid who doesn't know anything, basic training, a battle or two, becoming a hardened veteran, hijinks in a rear area that don't disguise the psychological wounds of war, a dissatisfying return home, and at some point a book. In this collective biography of the men of Charlie Company, Wiest elevates this story into the tale of a generation in the popular history vein of Stephen Ambrose.

This book is exceptional in depicting each of the men of Charlie Company as unique individuals; California surfers, Southern farmboys, Navajo shepherds, athletes and drag racers and factory workers and young fathers from across America. All of them were drafted (with the exception of one voluenteer) sometime in 1966, the course of their lives forever altered. In 1966 the Vietnam War was quiet news, something happening far away. Most people, if they thought of the war at all, thought that it was worth fighting and would be over soon. For the children of WW2 veterans, service when drafted was assumed.

While the men of Charlie Company were anybody and everybody, Charlie was a unique unit. It was part of the new 9th Division, which was being slated to fight in the populous Mekong Delta. Charlie was trained and deployed as a unit, unlike the stream of replacements which defined the American fighting experience, and the old hands were a closely knit band of brothers.

In the Delta, Charlie was part of the Mobile Riverine Force, Army troops deployed on small boats from floating bases on Navy transports. While close support from the Navy had some advantages, like showers and mess halls on base and close support from river monitors, WW2 era landing ships converted into a close support fire barges armed with everything from 105mm cannons to flamethrowers, by and large the terrain was awful. Patrols had to cut through leech infested channels and impassable mangrove swamps. Good routes on the tops of rice paddy dikes were sure to be mined.

The first few months were almost contactless patrols, 'walks in the sun' marked by attrition through mines and snipers, but soon Charlie walked into the nameless ambushes that characterized the war. In these battles, Charlie gave as good as it got, with small units suffering heavy casualties until American artillery and airpower suppressed Viet Cong bunkers, allowing one of the platoons to flank and destroy the enemy in close assault.

If there's a hitch to this book, it's that Wiest hasn't quite figured out how to write combat. I'm not sure how you get across the utter confusion of battle, but there's a level of historical dispassion to the combat that cuts at cross purposes to the rest of the book. But the final chapter, on the men's lives returning home and the post-1989 reunions save the book. This is about people, not war, and it works.

The ultimate tribute is that of the 134 original Charlie Company soldiers, only 14 returned stateside alive and unwounded.

The Stuff of Soldiers is a material history of the Red Army, drawing heavily on first person accounts of equipment to give a sense of how ordinary soldiers viewed their participation in the Great Patriotic War, and the Soviet project of modernization.


British Soldier's kit, 1916, from Thom Atkins's historical inventory photographs

Soviet cultural and standard military practices have many obvious analogs. Stakhanovite 'shock workers' were an industrial version of elite military heroism. Most militaries are transformative command economies, taking the raw material of draftees, supplying them with the tools of the trade, and turning them workers on an assembly line of death. And finally, soldiers are themselves interchangeable and replaceable parts. A unit in assault or defense is expected to take some proportion of casualties, a natural wearing down to be repaired in times of slack with new soldiers, while the intangible body of the unit continues forward.

The Stuff of Soldiers is an adapted dissertation, and a pretty good one given that it won the American Historical Association's Paul Birdsall Prize for best military history. The seven chapters move outwards, from the soldier's body itself, to uniforms, rations, shovels and entrenchments, offensive weapons, written paraphernalia, and war loot (the Russian trofei). As a whole, the Red Army was one of the poorer forces due to the relative backwardness of the Soviet Union and the massive reversals of Operation Barbarossa. Rations were prepared in bulk by field kitchens, rather than being individually packaged units. A simple sack substituted for complex web gear. Even socks were dispensed with, in favor of peasant foot-wrappings.

This book is best when discussing what seems to be uniquely Soviet features of the Red Army. Literary culture was public, letters to and from were read out loud. Along with official propaganda from on high, small units produced their own listoviki, exhortations of victory and revenge, with soldiers adding their own lines. The professionalizing Soviet army mimicked the Wehrmacht, re-introducing Tsarist-era shoulder boards to mark branch and Guards status, and wearing decorations for valor at all times.

As a military history and Soviet buff, this book has lots of great details, but little that's truly novel or surprising. And from a methodological perspective, synthesizing what soldiers wrote about their material objects is only a first pass. Machinery like tanks (link to a fantastic comparison of Soviet and Nazi tank production) is more amenable to complex discussions of industrial policy, but even a coat or helmet is a complex manufactured item. Random internet nerds like www.tankarchives.ca, or a guy in Colorado who goes by the handle Cessna, have more detailed things about the material objects of WW2. Cessna is positively livid on the many failing of Nazi uniforms (SomethingAwful forums link. Pay the tenbux, noob), some of which are based on a brief time as a German WW2 reenactor--Cessna is a solid dude, and most of the people who reenact the Nazis are very much not the kinds of people he likes to spend time with.

This is a good book, but it's award winning history from an Actual Russian scholar, and some internet nerds I know of are doing comparable work as a hobby.

Future Scouting is another entry in the increasingly crowded world of speculative design, a system for coming up with interesting and helpful ideas about the future. Now, to lay my credentials out, I am a published futurist and I've been working on my own system, Eventuality, to help small groups of people do futures thinking in a reasonable timeframe. So while there is an element of sour grapes, in that Future Scouting exists and Eventuality doesn't it, trust me when I say that this is a hard question, and that when I find the thing the works I'll shout it from the heavens.

With all of that in mind, Future Scouting is adequate but underbaked, a bricolage of techniques grabbed from other speculative design practices. The skeleton is actually pretty solid. Taking your values, grab a hold of an emerging social or technological signal and imagine a near future object, person, and location. Then considered the direct and indirect consequences of the world that you've created. And finally reflect back and sum up.

It's a solid backbone, but Lutz recommends turning to other speculative design sources to come up with the actual meat of provocative issues and trends. If you're stuck or lost, there's not much to get you started. Similarly, while there is a suggestion to reflect and perhaps collaborate with others, there's no structure or reward for doing so.

If you know what you're doing, Future Scouting will likely work, and if you don't, good luck. At the end of the day, there not enough originality or rigor for me to strongly recommend this method.

So Chuck Peruto is running for Philly DA in 2021, and has a section on his website titled "About the Dead Girl in the Bathtub", which is usually what we'd call a big yikes. This longform article (40 pages) is on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to see what was up.

And the answer is, not much. Peruto is a major Philly defense attorney who parties as hard as he works, and has had a string of 20 something girlfriends, all brunette knockouts. Julia Law was the latest model, a paralegal at his firm. But Julia had a complex life. She'd previously dated another lawyer at the firm, and a had a longstanding relationship with an anonymous older man. On top of that, she was an alcoholic, who was likely in the midst of a relapse. And one night when Peruto was at the Jersey Shore, she drowned in his bathtub.

DePaulo skips through the messy drama, but doesn't much get at the psychology of anyone involved, except perhaps Peruto who has a type for pretty, broken girls, and who really isn't husband material. Julia herself is a cipher, a joyful person who died a sad death, and I wish DePaulo had talked to more of her friends.

There's a B plot, about a potentially mishandled investigation by the Philly police into her death, and the weird way Peruto reacted, which was heartbroken but also for a defense attorney dumb as a box of rocks. True crime isn't really my genre, and this isn't much of an example.