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There’s popular and then there’s popular.

If you have a peek at the Technorati top popular blogs super-100 ego-thon (here) you’ll find things like Seth Godin’s blog, the Huffington blog, even A List Apart, but you won’t find some other very famous bloggers who are nevertheless, uh, famous bloggers. For example, Wil Wheaton or John Scalzi (both of whom I read on a regular basis).

These two guys have high rankings in the Tehcnorati ego-thon, and they get lots of visitors and also a certain amount of fame for their blogs. And I suppose that the Technorati ego-thon is a widely-regarded way of identifying just how “popular” a blog really is.

But.

You want to know something which might not show up in Technorati’s rankings but is without question the most foolproof way in this quadrant to really prove a blog’s popularity? I’ll tell you.

I read a number of post-modern enlightened web design CSS/XHTML wizard blogs on a regular basis. I consider these my professional (as opposed to recreational) blogs. Of these professional blogs, far and away my most favorite — and by sheer usefulness the most instructive — is Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street blog. Roger is well-known among the CSS design community, and he’s a favorite destination for lots of web designers and programmers, because he’s just so damned good at what he does.

But exactly how famous?

Well. Sometime yesterday (Sweden time) he posted an innocuous little entry asking his readers to answer three simple questions: do they browse the internet with their browser windows maximized, at what screen resolution do they operate, and what operating system do they use. Simple, straightforward, and requiring one-word answers. He asked his readers to answer in the comments for the post, and after two weeks he intends to close comments and compile the results.

So about fifteen minutes ago I posted my own comment. And what number was my comment?

814.

Eight Hundred and Fucking Fourteen.

Now, you, my gentle reader, may have very different attitudes, philosophies, tastes, and opinions, than me. Many people who know me personally might actually say that’s a good thing if you have different attitudes, philosophies, tastes, and opinions, than me. But let’s be clear on one point: if you don’t think that receiving eight hundred and fourteen comments to a post at your blog in less than twenty-four hours isn’t an astonishing statement on the popularity of your blog, then I’d really like to know what you take that is slowly disintegrating your mind.

Technorati and its ego-thon ranking is all well and good. Me? I don’t care if Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea Street is in the top one hundred or not — anybody who pulls 814 comments in less than twenty four hours is one of the top bloggers in the world.

Technorati tags: Roger Johansson

We all know that more and more products are coming out of China these days, with manufacturers lured there by cheap labor, promises of lower costs, full-service manufacturing and the whole bit.

In the boardgaming world, there are two major gripes I have with the industry, and one of those is the wholesale migration of board game manufacturing to China. Virtually every game I’ve gotten in the last six months has been entirely manufactured there. I’m not just talking about the plastic pieces, or individual components: I’m talking about the whole goddamned thing, from the boards to the bits to boxing and packaging. It just bothers me that the promise of cheaper manufacturing costs convinces American and European companies to abandon the manufacturing facilities of their own countries and support a vast economy that unpderpays its workers, and has no environmental restraints on industry to speak of, just to save a few bucks. Much of this savings is then gobbled up in the cost of shipping the bloody product across an ocean, through customs, and then to the company’s headquarters, all of this well before it enters the distribution networks. If you visit Fantasy Flight Games’ website, who are a current leader in boardgames (and have virtually all their stuff completely manufactured in China), you’ll see how often disasters happen as well, with badly flawed components that have to be replaced (such as with the boards on Marvel Heroes), or large percentages of their stock getting damaged in the harrowing 6,000 mile journey.

Anyway, given the toy industry as a whole, I’m not all that surprised that so many fall for the lure of China, since that goes way back. But another and totally different recent purchase completely took me by surprise –

I had to buy a new exterior door to replace a damaged one at my house, so while in Home Depot I picked one up off the shelf. I’ve bought doors before from Home Depot, and they were always manufactured by a local company in San Bernardino, so I didn’t think to look twice before buying this one.

To my surprise, and horror, however, as I was installing it I discovered that the core of this allegedly solid wood door was made of an inferior type of solid wood that splintered really easily and was a total bitch to work with. What was supposed to be a Douglas Fir solid wood door was still solid wood — only the Douglas Fir was laminated onto some other kind of crap wood in the interior.

Then I noticed the Made in China stamp on the packaging lying in a pile near where I was working.

OMFG.

Little plastic pieces in a boardgame are one thing, but whole fucking doors? What happened to the company in San Bernardino? Well, it seems that other local door and window places still use them, but being the slimeballs they are, Home Depot heard the siren call of cheap and went with a Chinese company. And the result is an inferior door.

But here’s the really ironic thing: it’s the same frickin’ price as the other doors were. So who’s benefiting from the alleged cost-savings here? It sure isn’t me.

Not only that, but I discovered to my horror that all the metal plumbing pipes for sale at Orchard Supply Hardware are now entirely made in China, as are most metal hand tools –

Case in point. I bought a three-pack of chisels from a Canadian company whose crap was manufactured in China. They cost fifteen bucks. The metal was so soft and inferior that the chisels broke after just a few uses. A month later I’m back in Orchard to buy some new chisels and find that Craftsman brand has a three pack with the same selection of sizes inside it, also for fifteen bucks … except these are made in the USA. Guess what? I’ve used them a hell of a lot more than three times and they’re still as good as new.

Come on. Is it really necessary to have our galvanised piping made in China and imported? What of our own steel industry? In Los Angeles alone there are tons of companies manufacturing metal piping. The irony here as well is that the pipes cost just as much for me to buy even though they’re inferior product imported from China!

This does not in any way imply some kind of dislike of China itself, or especially the Chinese people. I’m a huge fan of Chinese culture, language, and history. I cook Chinese cuisine. I often use Chinese traditional medicine. Hell, I’ve even been studying Mandarin Chinese.

My annoyance — and it’s growing daily — is with these weak and greedy American and European companies who so easily chuck the manufacturing facilities of their own countries and rush off to support the economy of a country over which our own laws have little or no jurisdiction, and we as customers end up with inferior crap that costs just as much as it did when it was domestically made.

I think the whole manufacturing/importing model is a disaster, and it’s only getting worse. And there’s not a damn thing I know of that I can do about it.

Dusk can be a magical time of day — the work day is coming to a close (well, sort of), people are headed home to families, food, couches… and the heat of the day is easing up, the earth getting a chance to exhale.

It’s particularly important in Los Angeles after a smoggy day like today, when much of the smog has burned off and there’s a kind of serenity gained, a chance to take a breath and smell flowers and plants earlier obscured by the frenetic invasiveness of the day’s human contribution.

On days like this, dusk holds a lot of power for me. I gain sync again. My writing muse comes out. My outlook is better.

That’s why it’s magic.

Guilt is when you buy a new book at Amazon.com instead of at your local independent brick-and-mortar store because it’s cheaper, even though you know that by doing so you’re contributing to the death of the independent book store.

At the rate I’m going with this, we’ll get to the 30th song in this oh so important list by about 2009. However, I know you’ve all been champing at the bit for the second installment in what may well prove to be one of the most important blog series ever written. Oh, you don’t like heavy metal? Oops.

For those of you still with us, this time we’re travelling back to the ancient times (1983) for one of the forgotten (or just plain ignored) sorta-masters of the genre:

Cloven Hoof: “Laying Down the Law”
(from their self-titled 1984 debut)

Cloven Hoof were one of the more notable bands to emerge after the first romantic blush of infatuation with genuine homegrown talent that was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or nwobhm for short. The first era of the nwobhm had pretty much fizzled out by early 1982, when the British music press decided that, since they’d given fame to their own country’s heroes, they could damn well take it away, too. By this point, those bands who had risen to prominence in the heady years of 1979 and 1980, had either self-destructed, completely lost their artistic sense of direction, or clawed their way to international superstardom.

But while the British press had pretty much declared the New Wave dead and buried, and decided that America and its well-funded rockers were the ones to watch, the nwobhm was kept alive by its fanbase, and by a whole new wave of musicians who kept the flame of British metal alive for all eternity … or until about 1985, whichever came first.

It’s important to bear in mind that the evolution of this neglected bastard child of rock was accelerating at a very rapid pace, and the colour and texture of the genre was vastly, vastly different in 1983 than it was in 1980, and here’s why. In 1980, bands like Iron Maiden and Tygers Of Pan Tang had a simple agenda: take the hard rock that they had grown up on — British hard rock, mostly — and re-energize it with a good dose of adrenaline. They succeeded admirably at this, and their infectious new sound galvanized people all over the world, who were themselves inspired to dabble in this adrenalized heavy rock.

By 1983, heavy metal had evolved into an international form, with tons of bands in, for example, Sweden, Germany and North America lending their own sensibilities to what had pretty much been entirely a British working-class musical genre just a couple years before. This new heavy metal standard, although heavily inspired by the nwobhm, was very different: it was faster, it was more aggressive, it was more technical, and it obviously was less idiosyncratically English. 1983 was a watershed year, in which, among others, Dio, Savatage, and Metallica all released their first albums.

And what of other British bands emerging at this time, themselves inspired as much by Iron Maiden and Diamond Head as by Rainbow and Judas Priest? The musical climate was as different for them as it was for bands in North America and Germany, and they too were playing something what was rather different than the first nwobhm bands were playing. In fact, it’s distinct enough, and the whole musical climate was distinct enough from the 1979-80 scene that it’s sometimes called the 2nd New Wave of British Heavy Metal. It’s a silly name, no doubt, but it’s apt enough, because this second wave of bands were very different indeed from that first, legendary wave. And most importantly, they were definitely thinking internationally in their asthetic, something that would save many from instant extinction (there was nothing like a tour of metal-mad Germany to pay the bills).

One of the bands from this 2nd Wave of British Heavy Metal is Midlanders Cloven Hoof, who’d been plugging away for a number of years before they nabbed a chance to record their first LP, with the ubiquitous Geordies Neat Records in 1984. With their occult name, and pop-Satanic lyrics, not to mention their elaborate stage attire, it’s kind of hard to think of these guys seriously, and even after an objective listen to their album, it’s hardly an instant classic; it would never make a top albums list of mine, or most other metal fans. However, these trappings aside, there’s a bit of a gem hidden among the grand occult gestures, and it’s a good ‘un.

Take the anthemic strutting of Judas Priest. Add a long and varied guitar solo ripped right from the best German power metal. Coat liberally with the vocals of a singer who somehow manages to pull off hoarse and gruff with melodic and spirited. Complement with a lyric that straddles the line between typical tough-guy heavy metal and just plain ridiculousness. And you get Cloven Hoof’s great classic contribution to metal, “Laying Down the Law”.

“Laying Down the Law” is classic, straight-on, no-farting-around anthemic heavy metal in the grand Priest tradition: catchy, instantly memorable, with the delicacy of a pneumatic drill and the emotional sensitivity of a debt collection agent. It locks into third gear right from the start and barrels forward with the measured ease of someone who’s strutting his stuff and in no particular hurry to get where he’s going (which is probably the pub, or perhaps prison, anyway). It doesn’t concern itself too much with throwing in lots of variation or experimentation, and it doesn’t need to: the band knows they’re on to a good thing and they’re going to work it.

A few minutes in it’s guitar fiddling time, and while this one doesn’t win any awards for awe-inspiring technicality or astonishing blasts of afterburner-fueled speed, what makes it cool is that it’s long enough that it gets the whole band in on the act, with these really cool riffs that bounce off the bass and drums in pure classic let’s-be-a-team headbanging. The solo is less about getting thirty seconds to wow the audience and more about taking a minute to go on a kind of journey, working its way down and around and up and through a whole structured segment of the song, weaving in and out of some interesting rhythmic changes that the drums undergo into a kind of semi-melodic mini-epic, but never ever disrupting that easy mid-paced strut that makes this piece of leather-bound metal so classically Priest-derived anthemic.

Another solo starts in at the end after a number of refrains of the “sing-along, mates!” chorus-line, the repeating chant of “Laying down, I’m laying down the law!”, just as the fade-out kicks in, as if to suggest that, man, if they had the time, they could have kept this up for another ten or fifteen minutes at their mid-paced swagger and still kept the audience chanting along.

But what’s it all about? Actually, it’s somewhat of a little-used bit of theme this one is based on: Prohibition-era Chicago, where the singer casts himself in the role of a policeman patrolling the streets, itching for the chance to rain punitive justice down on hoodlums, gangsters, and other scum…

You say I’m dreaming to believe in a better way
For this rat trap we call home
I’m the enforcer making sure crime don’t pay
and I’m not alone…

Anything written from the perspective of law enforcement is pretty unusual in metal. Most bands tend to cast themselves in the role of the outsider or the hunted, the victim of the law, either warranted or otherwise. But this is kind of a good example of why Cloven Hoof are subtly unique, and why this song in particular manages to stick its head above all sorts of other mid-paced anthems from the 80s — it’s just got something subtly unique about it.

But let’s not get above ourselves here: the reason this song makes the list is that it’s so damned catchy, so classically and addictively tough and swaggery, and just so damned fun. Cloven Hoof had their dreams of elaborate stage shows and nine-minute epics about battles between good and evil, but here in “Laying Down the Law” they forgot all of that and just got down to the business of blasting out one classic piece of tough, strutting heavy metal that never fails to coerce the listenger to chant along, “’cause I’m laying down, I’m laying down the law….”

Technorati tags: heayv metal, nwobhm, Cloven Hoof.

(this is a boardgame post — if these aren’t your thing you might want to scroll to the next post)

During my day at (d)orccon, I managed to acquire a copy of Battle Line, designed by the guest of honour, Reiner Knizia. GMT Games, the publisher of Battle Line, had a booth there, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it’s a Central California based company.

(I could go on and on about how I kept returning to their booth throughout the day to mess up their stock by drooling over it and practicing emergency discipline mantras to keep myself from spending money I didn’t have to buy everything they had on offer, but I won’t. Move along. This isn’t the parenthetical ramble you’re looking for.)

It’s slightly unusual that a Knizia game would be published by a wargame-based company like GMT, and someday I’d love to learn the story behind how they acquired it, but it’s a little less surprising when you learn that Battle Line is a new version of a German game called Schotten Totten, a card game about Scottish Highlanders competing against one another in a rock throwing contest (or something), which has silly cartoony graphics and is, all things considered, one of the last games I would ever consider buying.

Enter GMT and their wonderful artist (and co-Big Kahuna) Roger MacGowan, who took a very elegant game with simple mechanics but complex strategy (a Knizia trademark), chucked the silly stuff and gave it the signature GMT look, complete with ancient culture setting, warriors, a combat flavor, and MacGowan’s graceful and clean art. All of a sudden, I’m totally there. And for fifteen bucks, it’s not like it’s something you have to fret over justifying buying.

Battle Line is a simple two-player card game that takes less than ten minutes to learn. It includes seventy cards, sixty of which are called Troop Cards, and ten of which Tactics Cards. On top of that, there are nine wooden “flags” which resemble the playing pieces in Sorry! (incorrectly called plastic playing pieces on the game box — they’re wooden). These are lined up in a row in the middle of the playing space, and form the imaginary battle line of a pitched combat between two ancient forces (hence the game’s prosaic name).

As for the forces for each player’s army, these are represented by the sixty Troop Cards, seven of which are given to each player at the beginning of the game, forming their hand. Each troop card is numbered from one to ten, and is in one of six colors. Each number represents a different kind of troop type found in battles between Alexander and the Persians in the ancient world; for example, the cards numbered 10 are War Elephant cards, and they all have the same excellent style of artwork found on the box cover.

Each round, the player plays (must play — you can’t pass, which creates important strategic decisions) one card from her hand in front of any of the available nine flags representing the line of battle (flags can become unavailable, which I’ll sketch out in a mo). Your opponent meanwhile is taking turns doing the same thing on the opposite side of the flags, trying to outmatch the forces you are building up on your own side of each of these flags.

Once you’ve played three cards on each flag, that’s it. The flag is tied up and no more cards can be added. As you may well have guessed by this point, you win a particular flag by having a stronger suit than the cards played by your opponent, and suits are ranked vaguely like a highly-simplified version of Poker, with three consecutive numbers all of the same color being the highest ranked suit (a kind of straight flush), after which come three cards of one number, then three cards of one color, a “straight” of three consecutive numbers (of any color), and finally the crap set, which is three cards that bear absolutely no relation to each other and induce finger-pointing and sneering in all those who behold it.

(As an aside, these hands are called “formations” in the game, and the different ranked hands have war-related names, like “Wedge” instead of straight flush, but I always call them by the poker term they are based on.)

When both sides have completed their three card set, the player who has won (or who can prove she will win, if for example her opponent has not yet played all three cards at that flag but the two which have been played cannot possibly form a hand as highly ranked as her own) moves that flag from the center, battle line over to her side of the table, scoring for it. The first player to win three adjacent flags (or five non-adjacent flags) in this manner wins the game. Simple as that.

Well, not quite. If that were all that happened the game might tire quickly, but there’s a permutation that, while adding flavor and spice, also adds a bit more violence and nastiness to the game, and these are the Tactics Cards. On every turn, after playing one card from your hand, you draw a new card either from the Troop Card deck (set at one end of the line of flags) or from the considerably smaller Tactics Card deck (over at the opposite end of the battle line). There are only ten of these, and you can never put more Tactics Cards into play than one more than your opponent has played, but when you can play them, they often blow the game wide open by turning the tables on apparently hopeless flags.

Here’s why: Tactics Cards represent special events and variables in war, like the charisma and rallying cries of a leader (like Alexander himself), or environmental factors, like mud or fog. On your turn, you can choose to play a Tactics Card instead of a Troop Card, and the effects printed on these cards often serve to turn the tables on flags which a moment before seemed all but lost. For example, the fog card disables the ranks on both sides of a flag — instead, the sum total of the numbers only are used to determine who wins (the guy with the higher number). So if a player on one side has all but locked in that flag by creating a hand with, say, the numbers 1, 2, and 3 all of the same number, while his opponent has put down a 10 card and a 6 card that are not of the same color (meaning that any hand she completes could never be as high ranking), if she whipped out the fog card on her turn and played it on this flag, she would suddenly be the winner of that flag, because even with just two cards played, 10+6 is better than 1+2+3. Take that, asshole!

In many of the games I’ve played, the sudden appearance of one of these cards turned the tide of the game and wrested victory from the jaws of defeat. Not only do they shake up what might otherwise be just too linear a game, but that element of surprise adds a tremendous dimension to the strategy of playing.

And remember what I said earlier: you must play a card on your turn, whether you want to or not. Because of this, you’ve got to be very careful about how you start filling up those slots on each of the nine flags, because if you don’t receive cards of a particular number and/or color that you were anticipating, you could find yourself forced into completing three-card sets that have much lower value than you originally hoped, just because you were forced on a particular turn to unload a card somewhere, anywhere.

I hesitate to call this a thematic game (especially because it’s a re-themed game anyway), but a lot of the fun of Battle Line comes from the push and pull and back and forth of slowly building your own sets on your side while you watch your opponent build his on his side, and this wary confrontationalism does have a whiff of war about it. Trying to storm in on certain flags while you hedge your bets and wait on others to see what your opponent is going to play is where much of the strategy of the game comes into play. Since there are only sixty cards in the Troops deck, resources are scarce, and during the course of the game you will often see — to your dismay — cards you were hoping to get suddenly appear on your opponent’s side of the battlefield, shattering the chances of completing an all-important set at a crucial flag. And because the game can be won by scoring three adjacent flags, players can find themselves rushing to shore up areas of the battlefield that come under assault much like a real pitched combat ebbs and flows as weaknesses in the line or tactical holding areas suddenly come under fire.

The game plays in less than a half hour, and it only takes the flash of an eye to set up, so it might almost qualify as a really nice filler game if it wasn’t for the startling level of strategy and tactical decisions hidden beneath the surface of its very simple rules. Instead, it lies somewhere in between a nice filler game and a full-blown strategy game, in something of a relatively rare sweet spot.

To me, with its mixture of excellent and strategic gameplay, and kick-ass graphics and theme, Battle Line is a bigtime winner. The guy at the GMT booth told me that GMT’s warehouse is clean out of stock of this baby, and it may be some time before they go to reprint. Now, I don’t know if this was a sales line or not, but I’ve noticed that some online retailers are out of stock of it, so if you find it at your local games shop or wherever, you might be better off getting it now than later. Plus, it’s only fifteen bucks so it’s not as if the purchase will put you in the red.

(image via boardgamegeek.com)

Technorati tags: boardgames, Reiner Knizia, Battle Line.