Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, February 23, 2021, or: Milestones, Subs, and Other Flights of Fancy

Hello, there, Dear Reader. It’s mid-afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. Currently, the temperature is 78˚F (26˚C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity at 46% and the wind blowing from the west-northwest at 8 MPH (13 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is 78˚F (26˚C). We exceeded the forecast high of 77˚F (25˚C) by one degree, and skies have been mostly sunny today. Tonight, we can expect clear skies and a low of 53˚F (12˚C).

Well, folks, A Certain Point of View, Too has reached another milestone! Since I started this blog on WordPress almost 11 months ago, it has received over 20,000 views. As I write this, my WordPress statistics look like so:

Views: 20,018

Visitors: 12,898

Granted, I’ve only been here for less than a year, and this blog and its blogger are small fish in a huge ocean, but 20,000-plus views are not insignificant, either. My next major milestone is to reach 400 posts published – and I’m only three posts away from reaching that. So, if you’re one of my followers, or are just a casual passerby to my sometimes Seinfeldian blog, thank you for reading and reacting to my content. If it weren’t for you, I definitely would not be blogging. I do appreciate the fact that you take time from your day to check out my reviews, slice-of-life meanderings, political essays, or even writeups about gaming.

Apropos of that….

This morning I took some time to resume the South China Sea campaign; I completed three war patrols aboard USS Jefferson City (SSN-759), including one which took me on a mission to attack a Chinese convoy near Vladivostok, USSR.[1] I’m still not the world’s finest submarine commander, but I have gotten better at intercepting enemy units that my superiors order me to seek and destroy.  

That particular patrol was more successful than most; we did complete three of the five missions assigned by COMSUBPAC, including:

• Hunting a wolfpack of diesel-electric hunter-killer subs (SSKs) in the Sea of Japan
• Destroying Chinese freighters ferrying supplies from China’s vassal, the USSR, that attempted to sail from Vladivostok to China
• Destroying a small battlegroup of missile-armed surface warships

USS Jefferson City has also had chance encounters with enemy antisubmarine warfare (ASW) forces during her attempts to intercept Chinese reinforcements to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. We survived these engagements, but they forced us to use weapons that could have been used for more important targets. They also detained us long enough for our assigned target groups to escape without as much as a barnacle being scratched off a ship’s hull by a torpedo. 

Unfortunately, at the end of the third patrol and with much of our weapons loadout used – I was down to two Mark-48 torpedoes and a handful of anti-ship missiles – my luck with the Jefferson City ran out. Commander, Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC) ordered me to attack a surface group of Chinese missile-armed ships. I wanted to head back to Navy Base Guam, but you know, “ours is not to reason why, ours is to do or die.” So…I obeyed the directive from COMSUBPAC  – and lost my third boat of the war.

Luckily, the game decided that there was a U.S. Navy task force nearby, so after scuttling my boat in shallow water, my crew and I were rescued and I was given a fourth boat to command.

I saved the game there and quit, but not before taking one last screen grab with a summary of my war record so far:

Today I also came up with a rough draft of the beginning for Project X, my new screenplay for Juan Carlos Hernandez and his company, Popcorn Sky Productions. I need to fine-tune it before I send – via email – those few first pages of the script to New York, but I feel good about what I have written so far.

I’m going to take a short eye-rest break – maybe 15-20 minutes’ worth of not staring at a computer monitor – and then, it’s back to Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.0!

So, until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.

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[1] Remember, in this alternative history, the Soviet Union did not cease to exist. I’m not sure if it lost the Cold War altogether, but it is a shadow of its old self and earns hard currency by literally pimping out its military to the Chinese.