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worth taking rts developers need to start offering better answers than a hand wave in the direction of skill and mastery features win or die betrayal at battle grounds red bull esports reviews crit act of aggression review rock paper shotgun appearances podcasts esports today 25 august 2015 comeback kids three moves ahead 319 armello 2015 09 07 category gaming tags act of aggression esports esports today rts three moves ahead writing 6 comments recent work 23 august 2015 some people have asked me where the hell they can find all the stuff i m working on and the answer is or is supposed to be this blog but that only works if i update it i think one of the things this entire blog unwittingly demonstrates is what happens when you become a working writer and the job becomes less of a pastime and more of a career five years ago i saved every link to every article i published but for the last couple years i ve been cranking out so much work that there scarcely seemed time to document it all and i certainly stopped feeling like every story was a special snowflake the deserved to be memorialized especially when i was pulling gaming news shifts and 1 4 of what i wrote was notes on trailers and patches that s also a warning sign of course when you re forgetting about half of what you ve done within minutes of doing it it s probably time to shift gears i ve gotten away from news writing and am focusing more on feature work which is both more interesting and pays better the downside is that a lot more of my life is spent transcribing now there are services for this of course but unfortunately i find it s in the act of transcribing that i really get a handle on an interview and how it should be used i wish my brain worked differently but there you have it on the other hand there is a sort of meditative pleasantness in transcription it s the writing equivalent of long haul driving you just point the car down the road and zone out while miles and miles of blacktop whiz past with transcription you just fly through the audio and at the end you ve got 5 000 words of text to use for a 2 000 word article and your job just got a lot easier anyway this is a sampling of what i ve been up to lately this isn t quite everything i ve done in the last month or so but it s close these are all my major stories as well as the podcasts i ve done lately the big news is the launch of esports today a podcast i co host with andrew groen that s aimed at people who like esports but struggle to follow them when i got into esports coverage it was a constant struggle to stay on top of events and it s only gotten harder there are more games to follow these days but the coverage that s aimed at esports fans tends to be a little too obsessed with inside baseball it s pitched at people who don t need to hear news because they already know all the news esports today gets away from that we do a tight half hour show every week covering most of the major events and stories in professional gaming with enough to context to get you up to speed and ready for the next event it s probably one of the coolest things i ve ever worked on thanks in large part to andrew the gang at idle thumbs and our producer michael hermes i d love it if you checked it out over at esports today beyond that i m taking a sort of kind of vacation at my friend julian murdoch s just a week of living according to my own rhythms and enjoying things like quiet time reading and games with friends it s hard to get real breaks as a freelancer but at least this once i ve managed to get a few days off come monday i m still on break but the late nights and treating beer with chips and salsa like a meal replacement is going to end as i get back to the slightly healthier habits of my regular schedule and life in cambridge features how the deck is stacked against women in esports pcgamesn planetary annihilation titans resurrects a flawed rts pc gamer what the pros think of archon mode red bull esports impressions starcraft 2 whispers of oblivion rock paper shotgun steam refunds 2 months later pc gamesn cd projekt on the making of the witcher 1 rock paper shotgun reviews crit reliving britain s normandy nightmare with gateway to caen f1 2015 ps4 review ign f1 2015 pc review ign appearances podcasts esports today 18 august 2015 putting the evil in geniuses three moves ahead 318 warhammer shadow of the horned rat gamers with jobs conference call 462 19 august 2015 2015 08 23 category gaming tags esports esports today recent work three moves ahead writing write comment book review mark thompson s the white war i never thought much about italy s experience in the first world war what i knew about it was an offhand remark from the narrator of the sun also rises who was emasculated on a joke front like the italian i knew erwin rommel had first come to glory there putting into practice the theories of warfare that would drive german success early in world war two at a time before those theories had even crystallized and i knew that italy performed in line with jokes about its military incompetence but it turns out there is a remarkable and important story to be told about the italian front i only happened on it by chance in the remaindered section of the harvard bookstore where i picked up a copy of mark thompson s the white war for 5 after it had likely sat ignored on the history shelves in the same way that history buffs like me tend to ignore its subject matter in the main thompson s book fulfills its most important obligation it tells an interesting and unfamiliar story and it tells it very well the white war is stocked with scarcely believable characters like the proto fascist poet gabriele d annunzio who styled himself as the poet laureate of the italian right and was basically allowed to treat the battlefield as a kind of muse for hire one day he is seen giving pep talks to headquarters staff the next he is flying over austrian lines dropping propaganda leaflets the next time he pops up he is arranging some kind of absurd raid to capture a distant castle and raise the italian flag over its ramparts thereby boosting morale across the entire front in a way a character like d annunzio is laughable and stereotypically italian look at him bluster look at his vainglory look at this failure but the horror of thompson s book is that millions of men and women were caught up in this joke and at the mercy of the pure viciousness that lay behind the strutting vainglory as the italian raid on the austrian castle fell apart at a river crossing under heavy austrian fire stranded italian troops began advancing toward the austrians to surrender d annunzio watching from across the river was disgusted by their cowardice and orders the artillery to execute a fire mission against the italian traitors and such was the poet s power in this italian army that the batteries did indeed open fire and on the victims of d annunzio s own folly but all that pales next to the character of luigi cadorna a general whose name i had never heard prior to this book discovering cadorna and his place in the annals of history s worst commanders is like discovering there is an extra planet in the solar system that nobody ever mentions he s so profoundly awful as a general and as a human being that the mind reels in fact the white war warms to its task as thompson really begins dissecting cadorna s record and shifts focus from the front lines to the rear echelons and headquarters cadorna revealed himself to be an ineffectual martinet in the opening stages of the war as he squandered massive opportunities and then for good measure squandered immense numbers of lives trying to crack impregnable austrian positions across the alps yet he was so arrogant and so coddled by an italian government that feared his prestige that he was neither shaken by his failures nor fearful of their consequences but as the war dragged on cadorna s lack of accountability and belief in iron discipline began going to darker and darker places and thompson follows right along cadorna so contemptuous of the soldiers he was charged with leading became convinced that italian setbacks were due to poor morale poor discipline and outright cowardice his solution at first was limited to trying to remake the italian soldiery in his image ascetic hard working and fanatically dedicated to duty soldiers barely received any leave and on the rare occasions their units were rotated off the front lines they were sent not for r r but for hard labor behind the lines lest they become soft the theory was that soldiers should greet their return to the front with zeal and relief and go about each day without a thought of home and peacetime pursuits but as years of hopeless slaughter took their toll thompson s descriptions of combat along the varied and universally forbidding terrain of the austro italian border are frequently jaw dropping like when he describes italian lines where soldiers were living in tents anchored to cliff faces the italian troops became increasingly hopeless and their performance seemingly declined there were more instances of indiscipline and routing cadorna escalated matters taking a the beatings will continue until morale improves approach instituting an entirely extralegal regime of summary executions for all manner of infractions to be pursued at the discretion of officers in the field courts martial he decided were too lenient for the weak slovenly italian army he openly called it a policy of decimation the incidents thompson brings to light are shocking cadorna is a real life version of general broulard in paths of glory only far worse than even stanley kubrick could plausibly make out under his regime subordinate commanders began looking for reasons to execute soldiers so that they could demonstrate their fealty and zeal to the generalissimo s vision in one gut twisting example italy s ravenna brigade mutinies when it discovers it is being sent back to the line after only a short respite a few drunk soldiers fire guns in the air and many soldiers refuse to go then the assistant division commander and brigade co hear out the men s grievances summon military police to restore order and pack the brigade on its way except the division commander and eventually the corps commander get wind of the incident and began demanding executions first a handful of men are shot and then as each higher ranking officer hears of the incident ever more executions are demanded in the end thompson writes 29 men died to punish a minor rebellion in one battalion that lasted a few hours causing no casualties p 265 this is just one unusually well documented example thompson writes the actual death toll for cadorna s summary executions goes as high as 750 if not higher months later in the autumn of 1917 cadorna was stunned when a joint german austrian offensive hammered his lines at caporetto and his army collapsed with entire formations refusing to obey his order to fight to the death the undertow of progress this would all make for a riveting account of a disastrous military campaign but what elevates the white war is thompson s broader interest in italian politics and culture cadorna as a general is a villain but cadorna s absolute authority in italy his aimless brutality all these are harbingers of what is to come over the course of the white war thompson shows the seeds of fascism taking root in a soil rich with political social and cultural dysfunction italy a young state in 1915 immediately began drifting toward militaristic hyper nationalism and authoritarianism as soon as war was declared the press was promptly muzzled and happily went along with the policy of official censorship civilians were denounced and jailed for defeatism and lack of patriotism italy would not become formally fascist until 1924 but its slide in that direction started early in the war this had real consequences during the war and lent italy s ultimate victory a toxic legacy there were always more delusions and excuses that enabled cadorna s mismanagement of the war socialist agitators sapped the soldiers of their will to fight italy s allies weren t helping enough unpatriotic politicians were shaking the army s belief in itself every time they raised questions about the campaign the soldiers were weak lazy ignorant who broke faith when victory was at hand each of these stories became a part of the right wing s founding myth of fascist italy cadorna himself was called il duce long before mussolini who lurks at the margins of his narrative a minor player in the unfolding political drama and not yet sure of his own beliefs he was actively indulgent of suggestions that he be made dictator cocooned by a restricted press that parroted his own propaganda back at him and a quiescent general staff that had been conditioned to flattery and mimicry cadorna became convinced of these facts that he d helped invent thompson also shows how cadorna s mindless credos his oft disproven and oft repeated belief in the power of the offensive and the irresistible spirit of a good army had their underpinnings in a widely shared somewhat incoherent set of beliefs called vitalism which valued intuition personal character over intellect or material goods in an insightful and important passage that helps explain the entire era he writes vitalism appealed to the anti intellectual bent of intellectuals who already doubted the rationalist rules of their game trapped in the vast dynamics of nationalism imperialism militarism industrialisation and commerce and by the theories of natural evolution human history and the unconscious mind discovered by darwin marx and freud what room was left for individual reason and moral will how should men not succumb to the dark currents running below progress justly called the political principle of the nineteenth century namely a gnawing sense of degeneration and impotence merging fear of technology with fear of women in hindsight vitalism was a resistance movement a late romantic defence of the individual male and his solitary resources a consolation after the death of god in the mid nineteenth century and before the birth of human rights after 1945 for the vitalist vision is self deifying promising to restore mankind to his rightful place in the scheme of things able to master all species and materials through mystical life force p 229 230 this is a passage that immediately helps crystallize a lot of the thinking that went into world war i and even more of what came out of it it s fascinating that the italian front provides such a perfect window into the 20th century in thompson s telling the ultimate tragedy of the white war beyond all the lives lost is that thompson convincingly demonstrates that this incoherent mix of self loathing and denial never really left italy italy a young country at the time of world war 1 was traumatized by its monumental failures against the austrians it promoted the idea that...