Fred and Loathing on The Internet

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...

Spy novels themselves are the topic today. Why? Oh, just because there is one particular spy novel I have read recently. That novel would be Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. Thus we have something blog-worthy to talk about. There’s other media consumption going on, mind you. New films. Old films. Comic books! Among those choices, we here at the editorial dept went with Red Sparrow. And about what I like about spy novels.

Before we go on, I will flat out state that I liked the book. I felt that the writer was enjoying himself while he wrote the thing. From what I have gathered (among my trusted sources), is that he is an ex-CIA professional of many years. Knowing that, I picked this book up hoping for the closest thing to a true-crime spy novel. Who else could write an accurate depiction of the post-Cold War spy game other than a recent veteran?

There were a lot of very cold clinical depictions of true-to-life spycraft in this book. There is no denying this guy knows what it is to follow somebody or check if you are being followed. The modern espionage tactics; the up close and personal level of spying, was accurately depicted. Meaning he gave painstaking attention to describing how people walking around a metropolitan area can be surveilled. Sometimes the storytelling would be inverted when the protagonist try to thwart these textbook surveillance techniques.

The book contains numerous pages dedicated to players in the intelligence game watching...

So far in the publication history of the blog here at fredlambuth.com we have talked about robots, big and small. We have blog posts mentioning samurais, superheroes, super-soldiers, super drunk hardboiled detectives, secret agents, stygian knights, seafaring pirates. There have been orks, space orks, and even space princes. What has been missing among this pattern is the cornerstone of boyish simplicity: cowboys and indians. Good guys and bad guys. The team here grew up in Western civilization, so it’s usually the cowboys playing for the good guys and the Indians for the bad.

Cowboys, by themselves, had in fact been written about in this blog. By way of the Red Dead Redemption games. The video game where I put in 100s of hours toward simulating the life of an outlaw cowboy. The kind of cowboy seen in Hollywood or Italian Western films of the mid twentieth century. Not the actual ‘cow’ ‘boys’. The video game was about robbing trains, playing poker, dueling with pistols, and the like. It was not about rural low lives who drove herds of cattle between ranches and railheads in the ol’ Southwest. Those cowboys would make a boring game. ( They do. I hated the ranching missions. )

Indians rarely appear in either of the RDR games. The bad guys in RDR, is the advance of Western civilization. A societal mass, with European settlers serving as a vanguard for the new way of life cutting into the American continent. The Red Dead Redemption games are indeed about the...