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 freezer and heated up in lieu of a proper brunch. No coffee, either, so I've been irritable and enduring a headache most of the day.
As a result, I didn't do anything that I can call "constructive." I read a bit from Lawrence Wright's 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Path to 9/11. I'd watched the 10-part miniseries that aired on Hulu in 2018 (I bought the Blu-ray set last week), and because I knew that the TV adaptation only covered the period between 1998 and 2001, I wanted to read the whole story. (The mini is good, but it focuses too narrowly on one aspect of the 9/11 tragedy.)
Other than that, though, I mostly puttered about on Facebook and played a bit of Cold Waters, the 2017 submarine game by Killerfish Games that is a spiritual heir to MicroProse's 1988 Red Storm Rising.
Back when I owned my first MS-DOS "IBM-compatible) PCs in the 1990s. Red Storm Rising was one of my favorite games. The graphics were dodgy by the standards of 2020 computer tech, but they were decent enough at the time, and the game itself was fun and exciting to play - which to me is what mattered, especially since I was - and still am - a fan of Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising novel.
While I am not good enough at Cold Waters to play all of the Killerfish Games-created Single Engagements, much less the three Campaigns (NATO vs. Warsaw Pact 1968, NATO vs. Warsaw Pact 1984, and U.S. vs. PLAN 2000) that are the true challenges in the game, I am getting better on the Quick Battles that the game lets players set up for themselves.
I only played one Quick Battles session this afternoon, but I tried to design one that would be challenging without being so hard that my sub would get killed before I accomplished my mission.
Since I love "commanding" the SSN-21-class submarine USS Seawolf, I created a Quick Battles mission set on at 1400 hours on March 5, 2000. In Cold Waters' alternate history, the USSR doesn't cease to exist at the end of the Cold War. Instead, its economy weakened by the arms race with the American-led West, the Soviet Union is a shadow of its former self and allies itself with Communist hardliners in Beijing.
To earn hard currency to keep the country's economy on life support and the Soviet populace from starving and freezing, the Kremlin basically puts what it is left of its Pacific Fleet at Beijing's disposal.
And in this alternate 2000, the British turnover of Hong Kong to China never takes place, mostly because of tensions between a resurgent and increasingly assertive hardline faction in Beijing and a newly-cautious London, mainly over Her Majesty's Government's concerns that the Sino-Soviet alliance will not honor the "One Nation, Two Systems" 1984 agreement signed by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Premier Deng Xiao Peng.
Basically, in this mission, the Seawolf intercepted a Chinese invasion fleet headed toward the Spratly Islands on the South China Sea. The convoy was small, just two People's Liberation Army Navu (PLAN) transports and a Soviet oiler, But it had a formidable escort: two Kiev-class aviation cruisers, the battlecruiser Kirov, and a handful of Soviet and Chinese escorts.
I didn't add any submarines, helicopters, or patrol aircraft because past experience has shown that whenever you have scenarios that include the Kirov, you don't want to overstuff the pudding, as it were. I've created Quick Battles in which I give enemy surface task groups support from subs, and on those occasions, I have either been forced to focus so much on underwater that the surface ships escape, or my submarine gets killed - and rather quickly.
Happily, I'm getting better at this game. This is the first time where I have been able to sink most of the enemy warships with Mk.48 torpedoes, but I also sank two Kievs and the Kirov without suffering any damage to my boat.
I can't say that I am ready to jump into a full campaign just yet; I still haven't been able to beat the Cold Waters Killerfish Games-created Single Engagement titled Junks on Parade, which is far more difficult than the one I generated today in Quick Battles, but I am getting better at striking at enemy targets while avoiding counterattacks,
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies. The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s Carrie for director Brian De Palma in 1976), It was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like 11,22.63, the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of 11/22/63
In June of 1963, five months before the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Warner Bros. released director Leslie Martinson’s PT-109 , an adaptation of Robert J. Donovan’s non-fiction book PT-109: John F. Kennedy in World War II. Starring Cliff Robertson ( Charly, Spider-Man ) as Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy and co-starring Ty Hardin, James Gregory, Robert Culp, Robert Blake, Norman Fell and even an uncredited George Takei (Hikaru Sulu of Star Trek: The Original Series ), the film is a fairly accurate depiction of JFK’s naval service in the South Pacific as the commander of a motor torpedo boat given the Navy pennant number PT-109 (the PT standing for the Navy ship designator “Patrol Torpedo”). Although Hollywood had made movies in which former Presidents (either living or dead) were depicted, producer Bryan Foy, under the direct guidance of Warner Bros.' head of production Jack Warner (who, in turn, was influenced by Joseph P. Kennedy, a f
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