Hi, there, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon on Sunday, May 28, 2023, the last weekend of meteorological Spring ’23. It’s a nice day outside; it’s warm (80°F/27°C) under sunny conditions, and the forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of 86°F/30°C). The daily “highs” are creeping into the 80s/90s as both summer and the Atlantic hurricane season draw nearer, so today would be a perfect day for me to venture out…if only I were still the “venturing out” type.
About Last Night….
I am happy – metaphorically, at any rate – to report that I did not fall into the temptation to work on The New Story, at least not in the “let’s add a new scene to Chapter Nine” or “let’s rewrite part of Chapter Seven” sense of the term working on the New Story. I did re-read some of what is already on the rough draft, and I also made a few minor tweaks here and there. I want to make the revisions-and-rewrite phase as brief as possible; I’ve already been working on this manuscript for over a month (a record for me, yay!), and I do want to self-publish this story in 2023 (the 40th anniversary year of my high school graduation), so….
My Saturday night was, meh, I guess. It was…lonely, obviously, but after three years of being single again and with no easy way of meeting another “significant other” (OKCupid now makes it harder for people with free accounts to do much beyond browse the site for compatible partners…they want you – obviously – to pay for premium accounts to get all the benefits at OKCupid), I have come to accept that this will be the new normal for me.
As for what I did to kill time….
Well, I spent some time on social media just to have some interactions with other humans. Mostly on Twitter, though I did wish some of my friends a “Happy birthday” on Facebook and commented or hit “like” on posts that appeared on my newsfeed.
I also read some of my fellow WordPress bloggers’ posts and interacted with those at well. I did not comment on everything I read, but I did read over 20 posts and liked all of them. That accounts for a sizable amount of my Saturday afternoon and evening.
Once More Unto the Breach…with Tanks
After that, I played Regiments, a Cold War-turns-hot war game that simulates late 1980s-era land combat in West Germany in an alternate version of 1989 where glasnost and perestroika fail, and a mutiny by an East German army division somehow triggers off a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany.
I have not played the Grand Campaign which tells the story of this alt-history from multiple perspectives since last summer; the last chapter from Regiments main narrative involved the West German army’s efforts to investigate the odd reports of an insurrection across the Inter-German Border, and as I recall, I wasn’t doing too well in that “Operation.”
Instead, I played a Skirmish (that is to say, a single battle in which a player has X time to accomplish a set task to earn victory points but doesn’t impact the Grand Campaign in any way). I chose the Attack scenario (the Runway variant, in which my task forces must liberate a U.S. airbase from Pact forces), even though offensive missions, by their very nature, usually result in heavier friendly losses for my units than either the Defense or Mobile Defense skirmishes.
I set the time limit for 60 minutes – the maximum; I had, as I said earlier, no place to go and no one to hang out with, and I hadn’t decided whether to watch a movie or not. I have found that in Attack situations the clock runs out on me before I capture all of the Objective Zones (OZs) when I set the time limit for 30 minutes. And because I had not played the Runway scenario in months, I figured I’d need at least 45 minutes to grab and defend enough OZs to win a total victory.
I chose – because it’s the best U.S. unit in Regiments – the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Armored Division, and despite a few setbacks, I defeated the Warsaw Pact unit defending that airbase. It was a Polish unit (I don’t know which regiment was represented, as the Regiments: Iron Curtain update no longer IDs the specific enemy/friendly units in the after-action screen), and it fought well, even though I ended up winning a Total Victory in 35 minutes and five seconds.
My Night Ended Not with a Bang, But with Drowsiness
I also watched two episodes of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, although I’ll have to rewatch the second one because I was drowsy and I fell asleep a couple of times before I called it a night, turned off the family room TV, and went to bed sometime after midnight.
Well, this is getting to be a longer post than I anticipated, and I do need to take a shower, shave, and change into clean clothing, so I’ll close for now. Until next time – it might be later today/tonight, or it might be on the morrow; I don’t know yet – stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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