A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

  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 ...

  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 ...

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...

  © 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...