A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari   The last time I played the Operation Market-Garden scenario in Crusade of Europe - before my Apple IIe's monitor died on me - I was either 31 or 32 and it was still the mid-1990s. I recently bought the reissued Crusade in Europe by Atari (they took a 1985 game and tweaked it a bit so it would work on modern PCs) for $6.99. I still remembered how to play - heck, I spent countless hours playing that game when I was in college - but until today I stuck to the Normandy scenarios. © 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari Tonight - since I really don't do anything exciting here - I decided to try Operation Market-Garden: "A Bridge Too Far." © 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari I thought the computer would beat me since in real life the Allies did not gain a victory in Market-Garden. When I played the game regularly, sometimes I won, but most of the time I lost. Well, tonight I can honestly say...I did what Montgomery could not do in 1944. © 1985, 2022 MicroPr...

© 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari  Back in the late 1980s, when I was in college, my father’s brother Sixto gave me my first computer, an Apple IIe with a color monitor and an ImageWriter printer. I had learned to use Apple computers at Miami-Dade Community College’s Apple Lab, so naturally, when I had an opportunity to get a computer of my own, I chose one that I was familiar with instead of what was then the less user-friendly IBM PC. I used my new computer primarily for college-related stuff; when I got it, I was already two-thirds of the way into the Spring Term at Miami-Dade and had a paper due for my Music Appreciation class. (As I recall, it wasn’t a term paper but a comparison of two recordings of a theme by John Williams from the score of The Empire Strikes Back. ) I received my Apple IIe only a few days before it was due, so it proved extremely useful to my academic endeavors right off the bat. Obviously, I also used my computer for gaming. Hell, I’m nearly 60 years old ...

Image Credit: © 2014 Lenovo via Amazon  Hi there, Dear Reader. I know, I know; I haven't posted here in a while, but I have been busy on the WordPress version of this blog, and I don't always have either the time or the energy to work on both blogs. But, hey, I'm back to writing the 1,389th post for A Certain Point of View. As you can guess from the headline, this is a quick update to inform you that the computer I used to write most of the posts on this blog from April 2016 to January of this year is, sadly, no longer operational. It was working fine on Saturday morning when I booted it up, and it was running without any issues when I closed it down for a bit so I could watch a few episodes of 2019's Chernobyl.  However, when I tried to boot my Lenovo C560 "all-in-one" so I could game for a bit, it did not power up. At all. It was deathly still, with not a flicker from the monitor or a whir from its cooling fan.   I already wrote a more complete account of th...