PixlBit

Concerning Dragon Magazine 94, February, 1985, the month and year Steve Jobs was interviewed in Playboy Magazine about the Apple Macintosh computer, a hot product on the market that year. It’s an amazing interview with just tons of Mr. Job’s prognostications and insights into the computer industry. I think I was part of this Apple revolution and didn’t even know it. I had a Macintosh Plus I took to college in ’86.

                           

Clyde Caldwell did this cover. He did a lot of art for D&D products in the 80’s. He also did Heavy Metal Magazine covers at this time, among other things. In the 90’s he did Magic: The Gathering cards as one of his activities.

                

This brings back a fond memory I have about Anne McCaffrey’s book The White Dragon. I clearly remember being in an airport, probably going on a family vacation sometime soon after its release in ‘78, and seeing the paperback edition in a display carousel. It had a cover by Michael Whelan, who did some of my favorite Michael Moorcock fantasy book covers, featuring the white dragon Ruth with Jaxom on its back.

                                

It caught my eye immediately. Without knowing anything about the Riders of Pern series, I got the book and read it during the vacation. I was hooked. It was great. Then I read the previous two books making up the first trilogy of Pern novels and then started the second trilogy; however, I lost interest part way through that second trilogy. Despite that, I still have a fond memory of being introduced to the world of Pern through The White Dragon. The first trilogy was excellent.

Katharine Kerr’s article Large-scale logistics in a fantasy world was really fascinating to me. It was all about the movement of troops in a D&D campaign. She goes into some real world facts about the needs of medieval armies and the use of carts and pack animals. After reading this, I don’t know how medieval time armies managed to exist at all, or get anywhere. Supplying an army in a world of subsistence farming was not easy and required enormous caravans of carts and pack animals. Finding food on the road often required stealing from local farmers. Starvation must’ve been an ever present problem.

Medieval army logistics reminds me of resource management schemes in video games. WarCraft II was all about that. You’d build a huge infrastructure of farms and factories to build an army as fast as possible and then send it out to conquer. You didn’t have to supply the army during battle though. Once they were created, they lived on without support. Real life is, clearly, way more troublesome and complex.

Happy algorithms pixlbits!