I forget when it was, but I was in a heraldry group with somebody I'm somewhat distantly related to, and we got into a discussion about the symbols on his family coat of arms. They are called pheons and they are arrowheads as they were in the Middle Ages. Because of this being so definitive a weapon of war, the pheon has been a frequent symbol in military insignia, and it led me to look for insignia like these for one of my wargaming armies, in the interest of setting their character traits.
The two images above are courtesy of the Pentagon's Institute of Heraldry. The units are the 128th Aviation Brigade and the 158th Infantry Brigade of the U.S. Army. They are both training formations in the Deep South of the U.S. (Fort Rucker and Camp Shelby, respectively).
A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them. When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.
Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.
War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work. The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.
True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications. The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose. True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR! I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.
To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War. My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).
But I'm glad to get back these. And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49. The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.
FP
From a book I found years ago in the Carson Newman University library on the history of privateering in America...
How the prize money was divided among the crew of a Revolution/Napoleonic-era ship:
15% -- The Captain, who might be obliged to pay his superiors in his fleet
10% -- split between the Captain's Lieutenants and the Sailing Master
10% -- split among the Marine officers, the Surgeon, the Purser, the Boatswain, the Gunner, the Carpenter, the Masters' Mates and the Chaplain
15% -- split among the Midshipmen, the Surgeon's Mates, the Captain's Clerk, the Schoolmaster, the Boatswain's Mates, the Steward, the Sailmaker, the Master-At-Arms, the Armourer and the Coxswain
15% -- split among the Gunner's Yeomen, the Boatswain's Yeomen, the Quartermasters, the Quarter Gunner, the Coopers, the Sailmaker's Mates, the Sergeants and Corporals of the Marines, the Drummer, the Fifer, and the Petty Officers
35% -- split among the Seamen, the Marines and the Boys
Thanks to me having a Bandai Channel account for years, I've been able to finagle a Bandai Namco account, which gives me the benefit of allowing me to play GUNDAM: DUEL COMPANY when the game still has yet to be released to the North American market.
This is my Troop's homescreen.
This is my card bank as it was yesterday. (There have been changes.) All my current cards are "Rental" cards, which means I got them for free but they aren't worth anything. I wish I could get codes for the Promo cards, but nobody who's got them is sharing.
This is a typical Formation screen, where you lay out your Troop cards to make Platoons for combat. It's good that everything's in English, else I'd be totally lost.
The results of my first practice battle the other day. I'm now in a multi-player Conquest campaign. Currently my Troop is #8 in a 32-Troop Army, with more than 100 kills so far.
Almost six whole years after I first posted about it here I finally got a copy of Sky Crawlers on DVD.
Yes, it's very much a Mamoru Oshii movie. It's got characters walking around in existential hazes, realism that makes you wonder why it isn't live-action, and even a basset hound. While there is action--in deadly earnest--it isn't an action movie. The setting is both real and unreal, and the themes of his previous movies are taken in a different direction.
Basically, this is ONE scene from CATCH-22 transformed into an entire feature movie. Where in the Heller work (and the movie that came from it) the scene was played for satirical effect, in this case the concept's tragic meaning is thrown to full relief.
FP (who is wrestling with the existential ramifications himself)
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