Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I’ve been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We’re calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook.
Some time after the book was published, I recieved a very puzzled letter from the folks at Buzz Rickson's, who had been getting requests for black MA-1's. Once I had explained what was happening, they amazed and delighted me by asking my permission to make a repro of *Cayce's* jacket, to market as their Pattern Recognition model. Yes indeed, I said, and while you're at it, cut me one with an extra four inches in the back, please. Which they did, and it's over the back of a chair nearby as I write this. I love this jacket. (...)
People who complain about the very high cost don't understand the degree of sheer lunatic obsession that goes into these things. You are very unlikely to ever wear another piece of clothing this well-made. I know I never have. (They are actually better than the 1950s USAF originals, which were only finished to military contract standards.) They spent a million dollars, when the company started up, on machinery to reproduce 1950s USAF-spec Crown zippers. Nobody outside of Japan is very interested in paying for that, they told me, smiling. They have found their niche-market, bigtime.
It's nerve-wracking because it's easy to make a critical mistake. If we decoded a message incorrectly and dialed a single wrong digit into the computer that targeted our missiles, we might attack and destroy cities instead of rural missile silos in Russia. We could have easily killed millions of civilians by mistake.
We were usually still processing checklists when a warble tone signifying an incoming missile attack would be heard on our loudspeaker. We would hurriedly, sometimes frantically, strap into our chairs. In the real world, we would expect a violent shaking of our capsule mounted on giant shock absorbers. But in the mock run we were blasé and continued to race through the checklists.
We knew there was a system to the madness. The drill led us inexorably up the ladder of escalation, from a minor fire or incident to a full-blown order to unleash all 50 missiles. We had been conditioned, like Pavlov's dogs, to expect certain war orders to flow in a certain sequence, culminating in the launch of all 50 missiles. It was classic conditioned reflexes with absolute psychological certainty that it would all end in a hypothetical all-out nuclear war.
"Gay Bomb Nazi Castle" is the title of a collaborative story project. We post news and links about movies and books, war footage, video games, artwork, zombie lore, short stories, and much more.
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