Yesterday was quite funny on many levels: my wife woke me up with the words “Yo! I need a research server, complete with document management et all… pronto!” Now I’m in the planning phase and try to execute this order from my superior family member and have to compete with her university’s super computer (just one of the five biggest in the world).
Then, I spent the whole day watching Curling at the Olympics… Germany failed to qualify for most of the Curling events, so I was open for any team that got my attention. After the Italy-Norway match, I moved over to YouTube and overindulged in my latest hobby… watching reaction videos… too many of them. Somehow I ended up at some random YouTubers reacting on the 1981 anti-war movie from West Germany “Das Boot”.
I grew up with this movie. I watched it for the first time at the age of six or seven. I’m from a very Prussian family with military commissions dating back to the good old days when fire was invented and wheels were still square. Mostly cavalry… starting on dinosaurs, war elephants, horses and ending up on tanks.
On my grandfather’s special request I never joined that elite club of officers nor did I even do basic military service. But I love wargames of any kind: computer games, miniature wargames, traditional kriegsspiel, consims… I take them all.
A few years ago I played “The Hunters” a solitary consim by Consim Press where you play the crew on a German U-Boot in the first half of WWII. The rules are simple and the game itself plays great on Vassal. I did several playthrough using a different U-Boot class each time. The first half of WWII was childs play for the German submarines in the atlantic, but that changed dramatically in the second half, where they became “The Hunted“… a solitary consim by Consim Press where you play the crew on a German U-Boot in the second half of WWII. See the pattern??? 😀
It’s Sunday, I have a few hours left before the mass jump to Waypoint 3 of my Elite Dangerous expedition Distant World 3, and I started my playthrough of “The Hunted” in the iconic class VIIC U-Boot U-96. In the background the soundtrack of “Das Boot” is playing and I think that I might be able to sink my teeth into the game until my wife notices that I haven’t really done anything on that server yet. LOL
Okay, men, now listen. We’re going to blow out the water now and see if we can get our rear ends out of the sand. If we make it to the surface, things could still get pretty rough. Traffic’s heavy up there. And we have to pray the engines start, so we can get out of this mess. The condition the boat is in, we have got to head straight for La Rochelle. If we make it… it’s half a bottle of beer for each! There is one thing on our side; they won’t be expecting us. Well men, all set? – Capt.-Lt. Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, Das Boot
