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Tuesday, 09:21 pm, 08 June 2004 I took out a one month subscription to MagWeb today. Although a initially I didn't like the HTML format, I warmed to it quite quickly. From about a hour's cruising, I collected more than 200 A4 pages. I have read about half of that and saved the remainder. It is only scratching the surface. If you are interested in military simulation history, evolution and theory, it is an extraordinary site. Most of my initial reading came from Chris Engle's extended series of 'Experimental Games Group' newsletters. There is a quality in wargame theory that is pseudo academic. In fact, it is more stream of thought, self-discovery philosophy. For me, it is interesting reading although I find only about thirty percent of Chris' musings applicable to my development with Noble Warfare. Two other periodicals I looked at, the Junior General Report - for teaching wargames to children - and MWAN (the Midwest Wargamers Association Newsletter (?)). There is a lot published about getting kids playing wargames. It is an interesting thing actually. The amount of information about getting into schools and getting teachers on board reminds me of when my friend, Alex Brooks, worked for Games Workshop. As children I suspect we discovered wargames through, on one side, normal childhood play with toy soldiers and on the other side through the fantasy magazines that were a staple of our youth. In fact, I couldn't afford White Dwarf as a child. But Alex had a number of issues and it seems like hours of my childhood were spent in Alex's room reading White Dwarf. Adults didn't play a role. When I did find adults who played wargames, it was the one deciding factor that stopped me playing wargames, as a child. The aggression and stupidity - not to mention the smell - of the adult players and the sense that these people would never evolve into married humans moved me away from wargames. The idea that adults should proactively show wargames to children, to convert them to playing the games, seems quite alien to me. I don't like the idea of grooming which seems to be central in the documentation on this. I guess, you could argue, that all mainstream education had an element of grooming. But I see wargames as a chosen hobby. Maybe I am a purist. MWAN is a stunning periodical. It is an evolution of a club magazine. The articles are well written and diverse. The editorial work is spotless. It is akin to the best of Citadel Journal or even White Dwarf. But there is so much more to read on MagWeb and I still have my evening's Noble Warfare programming to go. If you don't know Mridul P from Gurap I have added a Regulars page to the site. If a new reader comes to the Log, they may miss who the people I write about are. So the first instance in each entry referring to a 'regular' will contain a link to the page. Five people. One I have met. It is a funny thing the internet. A funny thing, too, living in Cheshire where there aren't the friendships of my life prior. Good night. Monday, 07:34 pm, 07 June 2004 Noble Warfare is coming together at roughly a new feature per day. The evening work and day-time pondering is paying off. I keep thinking - will this be something people will like or notice. To get a game to a basic state, a playability state, so much work needs to be done behind the scenes. I am nearly at the stage where the game-play behind the scenes is concluded. Reagan, Butta and World War Two It seems strange working with the Reagan samples in the Butta track. I am thinking of cutting them and reworking the track totally. I am not happy with the musical feel of the track and generally unhappy with the overall sound. I should be more proactive with these things. I should say, I would like it this way. Or a chorus would be useful. I was thinking of hosting the PD version of Reagan's 40th anniversary of D-Day online. It is only 2Mb of MP3. But with so much going on currently, I am sure folks who want to find it will find it through other sources. As a child, I used to go to the War Memorial - really a War Museum - in Canberra. I would cycle there with my father. It seemed like every weekend. Many weekends it probably could have been every weekend. It was a long cycle. But I really liked the War Memorial. It was the best museum of its kind in Australia. Probably one of the best museums in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. I know it was refurbished at the end of the 90s and I didn't like what I saw. But that is another story. It was big and cold. Really cold. On a hot day, having cycled, you would go into this cold building with a musty armour smell. The German leather. The wood of the guns. The grease. It was an amazing memorial. As an adult, having spent time in Germany, I think the greatest lesson about WWII is how good people are force to lay their lives down for tyranny. The image of the Germans as evil (perhaps from my childhood) is replaced with the reality of the Germans I have met. The friendliness and warmth of the Germans. Particularly older German men. So my thought on the anniversary of D-Day was in the futility of war. The interesting footage of captured German generals embracing the British generals. The kinship at the top and the slaughter all the way down. The generals played their wargames. It is a luxury to create wargames on a computer and not live through the reality of war. Tactics over tactical forces. Good night. Saturday, 05:20 pm, 05 June 2004 It wouldn't be Barbalet's Log without some serious Fred Reed images early in the month. Fred has outdone himself again.   I have been putting in the extra hours in the evening for Noble Warfare. The interface is almost complete. The file handling is in place. It is almost at the stage of real gameplay. It is taking quite a bit of time though. Although sections of code are writing themselves, I am spending more time off the keyboard than I can spend on it. This lack of keyboard time in after hours development, I have written about quite a bit in the past. It is the nature of the development but it also produces pragmatic code when the fingers hit the keyboard. Nothing much else to report. Good afternoon. Friday, 08:02 pm, 04 June 2004 It has been more than a week since my last entry. I must apologise for the lack of updates. The plan was to implement a version of Logtrack on my wife's machine. But my development time has been spent on Noble Warfare and everything else in my after hours development has dropped off. In other news, I have found another person I once knew who is writing a weblog. I briefly went to school with Claire Bowern and continued to correspond with her when she moved away. We went to Uni together too. Although a specialist log, a log none the less. It makes me wonder actually, if Barbalet's Log was to become a specialist log - what speciality would it have? In the path of least resistance, 'Musing about the after hours developments of Tom Barbalet' seems to be a reoccurring topic. Perhaps 'Open Source Ethics'. Less 'Dejected Miniature Collector' perhaps. I have a working version of the Butta Beats track online. I am going to remix it heavily, me thinks. A final note of interest for facial hair fans, my wife has convinced me to grow a mustache and goatee. None was more impressed than my father. Barbalet means 'little beard', but none of my generation have sported the face fungus. My father was the only one from his generation to hold multiple hair-styles on the same face. I have promised to put photographic evidence online in a couple of weeks. A warning in advance, if this is the last entry of this month, it is because I have been working late on the Noble Warfare code. Good morning. [ Previous Log ]
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