‘No hay novedad’: Life in the Time of COVID-19

Posted byAlex Diaz-GranadosPosted inBlogging, Books, Computer Games, Creative Writing, Gaming, Sid Meier's Civilization series

Screenshot from today’s session of Sid Meier’s Civilization V.

Hi, there. Welcome to another edition of A Certain Point of View, Too, my new blog in WordPress. As I write this, it’s almost six o’clock on Thursday, April 9. Here in my corner of Florida, it’s 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius) under mostly sunny skies. It’s early spring, but here in the Deep South we’re in the subtropical zone, so it’s already beginning to feel like summer.

As much as I wanted to get another review done for either of my two blogs (I still plan to keep writing on the original A Certain Point of View blog; it’s already becoming a challenge to do two blogs at the same time, but I’m not about to turn my back on a project that I started in 2010 and is still getting page views and AdSense revenue.), I didn’t. I woke up tired, depressed, and unmotivated, so instead of writing, I spent most of the day playing Sid Meier’s Civilization V as Darius of Persia.

A screenshot of a late-game look at Persian-dominated Africa; Sid Meier’s Civilization V has an “Earth Map,” but it doesn’t let you start in historical locations. As you can see, my Persepolis is located on the Gulf of Guinea, or, in this case, the Bight of Persepolis. I have quite a large empire; I control most of the African continent, plus I have colonies in Australia and even one city in North America.

I suppose I should have tried to concentrate on writing a couple of blog posts, but sometimes I find it incredibly hard to focus on “serious” writing. I don’t know if it’s because I’m frustrated with the whole coronavirus thing or just mentally and emotionally tired from all of the changes in my life since April 2010.

Consider, over the past 120 months, I’ve had to deal with my mother’s long (five years!) final illness, her death, a foreseen but undesired estrangement from my older half-sister, a prolonged (but successful) fight in Miami-Dade County Probate Court over Mom’s estate, and a whole slew of unforeseen changes that sometimes still frustrate me.

So yeah, sometimes I get melancholic and have to resort to my go-to means of entertainment to get through the day: Books, games, and my downloaded digital albums on my Amazon Music library. In a situation where I have to use my computer on Airplane Mode, I am thankful that I can play Civilization V or listen to my tunes without being connected to the Internet. (I can’t, sadly, access my Movies Anywhere account in offline mode, so if I want to watch movies in my office, I have to do that on my TV/Blu-ray combo…which, because of the layout of the room, is not optimal.)

So, yeah. Today I slacked off and indulged my inner gamer.

Ah, yes. The haughty Maria Theresa of Austria is one of the great rulers I have to compete with as Darius I of Persia. I love the graphics created by the Firaxis/Take Two team that designed and programmed the fourth sequel to 1991’s Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Tomorrow is another day, as the lady says in Gone With the Wind. Hopefully I will feel better about things and, as a result, be more creative…and productive.

Published by Alex Diaz-Granados

Alex Diaz-Granados (1963- ) began writing movie reviews as a staff writer and Entertainment Editor for his high school newspaper in the early 1980s and was the Diversions editor for Miami-Dade Community College, South Campus' student newspaper for one semester. Using his experiences in those publications, Alex has been raving and ranting about the movies online since 2003 at various web sites, including Amazon, Ciao and Epinions. In addition to writing reviews, Alex has written or co-written three films ("A Simple Ad," "Clown 345," and "Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss") for actor-director Juan Carlos Hernandez. You can find his reviews and essays on his blogs, A Certain Point of View and A Certain Point of View, Too.

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