A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 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 ...

A screenshot from my Steam account's Screenshots  page.    Hi, there, Dear Reader. If you are a regular reader of this blog or its WordPress counterpart, A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that I lived through the last 28 years of the Cold War and the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I won’t exaggerate and claim that I went to bed wondering if the next day I’d wake up to the news that the United States was at war with the Soviets. The late Cold War period definitely had its dark, scary moments, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 and the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shootdown of September 1983, but my Cold War experience paled in comparison to folks who were kids in the late 1940s and early 1950s and lived through the creation of the Iron Curtain, the establishment of NATO, the Korean War, the various crises centered on Berlin, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, ...

Title screenshot of Flashpoint Campaign: Red Storm - Player's Edition. © 2014 Slitherine Ltd/Matrix Games and On Target Simulations On November 21, 2014, the UK-based computer game publisher Matrix Games released Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm - Player's Edition, a revamped version of the original turn-based strategy game set in an alternate history of the 1980s in which the Cold War turned hot and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact clashes with the U.S.-led NATO forces in West Germany. Created by On Target Simulations for the merged Slitherine Ltd/Matrix Games studio and inspired by several fictional works about a hypothetical Third World War fought in the mid- to late 1980s, including Sir John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm - Player's Edition puts you in command of either the Allied or Soviet armies in several campaigns and more than 20 stand-alone scenarios, including many player-...

#80sChristmasList The 1980s coincided with my high school and college years. They also coincided with the last decade of the Cold War, the advent of new technologies, and the emergence of Tom Clancy and the technothriller genre of popular fiction. The following is a sampling of various Christmastime lists from across the decade, although the default year is 1985, which was my freshman year at Miami-Dade Community College. I eventually ended up owning all of them; if I didn't receive them during the holidays, I'd get them later as birthday presents or, as in the case of my first personal computer, an out-of-the-blue gift from a relative. And, of course, once I got a few jobs, I'd buy things on my own. Personal computer (I was given one in 1987, an Apple IIe that cost approximately $2,100, or $4,774.56 in 2019) New-release VHS tapes of feature films (average cost in 1985: $79.99, or $190.85 in 2019) Novels by Stephen King Novels by Tom Clancy Music albums on...