A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

I can't remember if this was a Thanksgiving photo or not. But this was probably taken in 1986, judging by my beard and the deerskin rug on the living room floor.    I can’t remember the last happy Thanksgiving that I experienced in Miami before my mother died in July of 2015.   As Thanksgiving 2020 lurches its way to my current abode in New Hometown, Florida like a dreadful creature from a 1930s horror film (complete with artificial fog generated by dry ice), I sit in my now claustrophobic bedroom/study and try to recall a holiday season that wasn’t in some way dampened by discord or drama. And even taking into account the passage of time, the unreliability of memory, and my own biases, I can’t remember any truly happy Thanksgivings where my half-sister Vicky was present. Oh, sure. I can recall those recurrences of the holiday that were peaceful and even joyful because Vicky was absent. Thanksgivings at home with Mom and – on occasion – friends and family members who happened t

Image by  John Hain  from  Pixabay  Hello, Dear Reader. As I start writing this, it's almost 9 AM Eastern in what I'll call New Hometown, Florida (as opposed to Miami, which is where I lived when I started this blog a decade ago). Right now the temperature is 77℉ (25℃) under mostly sunny skies. With a south-southwesterly breeze blowing at 5 MPH (9 KM/H) and humidity at 93%, the feels-like temperature is also 77℉ (25℃). Today's forecast calls for a high of 87℉ (30℃) and scattered showers throughout the day.  I'm sorry that I have not written here since September 29, but as you know, there are several reasons why I have been relatively slow in creating content for A Certain Point of View. First, as you know, Facebook blocked this blog in late March because some Trump supporter (or supporters) didn't like what I was writing about their beloved Donald Trump (aka Mango Mussolini or Orange Caligula). This forced me to create a "sister blog" over on WordPress — A

  Image by  My pictures are CC0. When doing composting:  from  Pixabay   Hi, there. Well, here we are on Tuesday, September 29, 2020. It’s mid-afternoon here as I write this; I’m composing this blog post during my enforced “airplane mode” period, so by the time you read this it will be late afternoon in my small, depressing, and lonely corner of Florida. As you can guess from the post’s title, it’s a gloomy, rainy early autumn day here. According to the weather app on my smartphone, the current conditions indicate a light but steady rain, and the temperature is 77 ˚ F. With humidity at 93% and the wind blowing from the southwest at 11 MPH, the feels-like temperature is 77 ˚ F. I have lived all of my life in places where it rains heavily at this time of year. Mostly the Miami area, but I have lived for extended periods in Bogota, which tends to be rainy and chilly at least during the local wet season. I also spent three months, or almost three months, in Sevilla (Seville, Spain.

  Bloggin’ On: Thoughts Upon a Late September Sunday in 2020   Image by AbsolutVision Hi there, Dear Reader. I’m sorry that I have not been as active here as I used to be; writing material for A Certain Point of View, Too is consuming much of my writing time, and it is not often enough that I can create content for two blogs in one day. If a Trump supporter had not gotten bent out of shape over some of my more vocal political posts that I shared on Facebook back in March, I wouldn’t have needed to create a “sister blog” on WordPress and we’d be well past the 1,355-posts mark by now. Indeed, just getting to the 1,355-posts mark has been a struggle for me: I don’t really want to repeat myself on two blogs by creating semi-duplicate content on a daily basis, and sometimes I am just so tired of sitting at my desk and staring at a computer screen all day that I. Simply. Can’t. Write. For. Two. Blogs. On. The. Same. Day. My old neighborhood in South Florida. It's probably hot and h

Photo Credit: National Archives via US Navy   Hi there, Dear Reader. Well, today is Friday, September 18, 2020, and right now it is late afternoon in my corner of Florida. According to my phone’s AccuWeather app, it’s hot – Africa hot, as Eugene Jerome liked to say in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues. It’s mostly cloudy and the current temperature is 89 ˚ F, but with 62% humidity and a westerly breeze of 6 MPH, the feels-like temperatures are 95 ˚ F in the shade and 98 ˚ F in the open. Not as bad as yesterday, but it’s still summery rather than getting close to autumn. That’s what living in the subtropics entails, really; we are spared from the bone-chilling ice and snow of northern climes, but by the same token we need to live in houses and apartments with functioning air conditioners and endure the six months-long hurricane seasons. Photo illustration courtesy of Pixabay Today was a productive day, at least on the writing-blog-posts front. I actually wrote two posts in A Certain Point of

  © 2017 Killerfish Games If you are a regular – or semiregular – reader of A Certain Point of View, you probably know that in July I purchased Killerfish Games’ 2017 submarine game Cold Waters from Steam. I had been wanting to get it for some time, but I waited till it was on sale; I didn’t want to shell out nearly $40 for a computer game, even if said game billed itself as the a spiritual heir to MicroProse’s 1988 classic, Red Storm Rising. Like Red Storm Rising, Cold Waters has Training, Single Mission,  and Campaign modes; unlike Sid Meier’s game, which is based on the late Tom Clancy’s 1986 best-selling novel, it gives players the option to play as an American, Soviet, or Chinese submarine commander in Cold War-turned-hot campaigns set in three distinct eras (1968, 1984, and 2000) in alternative histories which take a turning point in world affairs – say, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of ’68 – and tweak it so that the two blocs that waged the Cold War find

Single Mission menu from Cold Waters, with Junks on Parade selected. © 2017 Killerfish Games   Death in the Taiwan Straits If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been playing a cool submarine simulation by Killerfish Games, Cold Waters. Released three years ago by the Australia-based game designer behind Atlantic Fleet, Cold Waters is the spiritual successor to one of my all-time favorite games, Red Storm Rising,  Like that 1988 MicroProse classic based on Tom Clancy's eponymous 1986 novel — which I've written about in both my blogs — Cold Waters puts the player in command of a nuclear-powered attack sub in a hypothetical conflict set in the latter part of the 20th Century. Unlike Red Storm Rising, which posited a Third World War in what would have been the "near future" in 1986, Cold Waters examines three different "alternative histories" set in three different time periods: 1968: In this alternate version of the tumultuous year

A Soviet warship cruises into battle in Cold Waters. © 2017 Killerfish Games   Greetings, A Certain Point of View readers! Well, it's Friday evening here in my corner of Florida; as I write this, the temperature outside is 88℉ (31℃). With the sun coming down and the wind blowing gently from the north at 5 MPH and humidity at a sticky 67%, the feels-like temperature is 98℉ (37℃). It isn't as hot as it was five hours ago, but it's still not good walking weather, at least not for me. Today was not a productive day here. I went to bed late last night; it was well after midnight when I finished watching two episodes of The War: A Ken Burns Film, that much I know. I'm guessing it was at least 2 AM when I finally hit the sack. I slept well, I think, but because my Significant Other is lax about food shopping, we didn't have milk and we were out of orange juice. As a result, my breakfast - lunch, really - was two slices of pepperoni pizza that someone had taken from the fre