- "Dark, Gritty and Grounded in Realism"

Simple, elegant and writes well.

So they'll just start shooting soldiers with RPG's now. Gonna be fun for the surgeons and medics.

Mutant Chronicles is not a bad game in itself, but it does expose the way a majority of people get lazy. Bottom line is that MC was a Warhammer 40K style dystopian future and it just copied the template.

From what I understand it was the other way round, the trippy bits were Kubrick's and Spielberg did the straight stuff ... Anyway it was an intriguing idea but the internal logic just felt so heavy-handed.

I like your magical thinking ... I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

It's hard being a rebel, watching all those middle-age men and women with their distended tattoos staring at my unblemished skin ... thinking "Look at the inkless freak, must be a criminal or a layabout, why can't he be normal like the rest of us ?"

We all know about Hollywood accounting and how the system is out to screw everybody who doesn't belong to the inner circle of the privileged. I remember reading about how they made the original handset for Quantum Leap, which was a small technical feat at the time, as this was long before the iPhone tech days. It…

Containers are not waterproof, but some will float for a while, depending on the cargo, stuff like scrap metal doesn't quite make it, but a container full of sneakers or foam might stay up for a surprising amount of time. Problem is that rust and salt water tend to ruin the contents. Your best bet is to wait till a…

The film holds up in the first part, aside from lapses in logic (a robot that eats and malfunctions is a shoddy product ...) But once you get to the sub and the blue fairy it gets really trippy and the whole single day thing is so arbitrary ... even fairy tales have to have internal consistency, this one didn't have…

Shipping has changed a lot over the years, 9/11 and economic pressure have made it an extremely demanding business. And I will concede that the company I worked for did push everybody to oversell and rip off the incoming sailors as much as possible. That's one of the reasons I didn't stay (that and getting a better…

The current generation of large ships are starting to see more and more problems due to their size (increased torsion and buckling in bad weather puts more strain on the twist locks and cross-braces) and there is concern that 20K+ TEU may be putting too many eggs in the same basket and cause potential problems for the…

You have the shipping agents and ship chandlers who support the ship while it's in port, they are the people who can get you anything short of the illegal stuff (and then again ...) From have a TV fixed or arranging a visit to the dentist to getting Ben and Jerry Ice Cream for the captain's birthday. A company I…

About ten thousand containers are lost at sea each year, that's about 100,000 tons of goods disappearing each year, not to mention the container ships that catch fire, sink or run aground. You don't want to hear the news that your 14,000 TEU carrier had an "incident"

Trucking is still very inefficient as a large percentage of journeys are done empty. So there is a huge market in coordinating transport of goods outside the classic methods. See it as carpooling for goods, different from classic groupage techniques as it requires a good overview and response to the logistic needs…

We'll probably be able to make a table or a part for something relatively simple, but printing a new TV, Car or a kitchen stove locally is still years off.

In the port of Antwerp the holes where the twistlocks fit into are called "pots" and the men who are tasked with locking and unlocking them are called "pot-men". The dockworker hierarchy is still tightly regimented and even protected by law, though economic pressure is slowly eroding the privileges of the dock…

One of the problems is that we are reaching the limits of containers, you can only stack them so high before the structural integrity gives up and building bigger ships isn't an option either since the various canals, isthmuses and locks that connect the oceans are a certain size and ships wouldn't get through. So we…