Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Were there a Real-Time-Strategy game centered around the war in Vietnam (the 1960s span of it), I would imagine that the soundtrack would make use of the US pop/rock hits of that same era. You know… Vietnam War music. CCR (with overemphasis on Fortunate Son). Motown girls singing in harmony. Folk adjacent California hippie rock messing around with electric guitar noises. The main menu, pause menu, intro all seem ripe for the use of license 60’s rock’n’roll sounds. Or some facsimile if those can’t be had.

The only Vietnam era themed game I can think of (Battlefield Bad Company 2’s DLC), draped the game’s user interface with twangy Creedence sounds. The game was basically the same game as Bad Company 2, just with Vietnam War flourishes. It was still a multiplayer first person shooter of automatic rifles, grenades, tanks, and close air support, despite being set almost fifty years prior to the regular Bad Company 2. I suppose the music can be enough to make the player feel like there’s more to it than just a paint swap of the regular Bad Company 2 set in the modern era of warfare.

Oh wait. I have planted a ‘Nam game. I played Rising Storm 2 over a free weekend on Steam! It was an online team shooter set in the Vietnam era! I do not think it had the budget for the song rights to rock/pop hits of the 60s and 70s. Those developers did not have EA Games type money to throw around. That game approached the authenticity of the war by making the game rules more...

A new type of book to be reviewed on the blog is upon us. Behold! This time the genre is true-crime. Organized crime, that is. The book I read is not about some creepy nobody stabbing helpless women in the night at random. No, this kind of true crime is the kind populated by racketeers working together. This true-crime story is about career criminals working together in citywide conspiracies, teetering on the edge of legitimacy. The true-crime documented in this book was the highest type of crime that can be reached when working outside of the law.

In the book Where The Bodies Were Buried by T.J. English, we have a case of somebody able to operate on a higher criminal plane than what he should have. James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was able to play outside of his Boston hoodlum league because he could do something no other mobster could do. That is, he could perform his dirty work and keep it inside the law.

By law, I mean having federal cops having his back any time state or local police investigations implicated Whitey in his nefarious acts. Many times those being murder, administered personally. Perhaps he could have risen to his rank without unofficial legal assistance. It cannot be argued though that once he had a FBI protection enchantment cast upon him, he felt he could perform whatever act he thought necessary to further his criminal enterprise.

Unless Whitey Bulger got himself a capital fund, he had reached the highest echelon of crime he and...

Dearest blog readers, let me assure you that the development team here at fredlambuth.com follow the utmost professional writing practices. Among the staff, we adhere to the Ernest Hemingway school of writing. With quite a few corollaries from the teachings of Hunter Thompson added to that.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are correct to assume we are prepared for the job of delivering a quality blog post. Around this domain, we make sure we are overflowing with vim and vigor before arming ourselves with our writing implements. Writing is a thirsty business. Our writers are expertly provisioned for their craft. For an august occasion such as an end of year review.. Well, that would require all team members to be properly fueled for precision writing delivery. Support staff as well, not just the field agents.

As far as we can guess, the graphics dept is also primed for adhering to the same standards as the writers. The graphics department does not respond to work orders in anything that resembles human language. In person they do make hideous sparse noises when pressed for an answer. Their preferred manner of discourse is leaving cryptic written communiques that come close to being understandable. 5/9 times they come through on their graphic accompaniments, according to an informal census among the editors. Difficult as these graphics types are to handle, they too require just as much creative fueling as the writing team.

Had you read the annals of the...