Chasidim-Franciscan Chess Set
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Category Archives: Games
Fort Sumter
South Carolina’s license plate says, “First to Fight,” still rebelling after all these years. North Carolina’s says, “First in Flight,” in honor of the Wright brother’s feat. Fight or flight are two instinctual defense mechanisms, but I am not going to go there, because Anne has just won the license plate game. Rhode Island was the last holdout. She restarted the game and then saw another Little Rhody plate. This means that Rhode Island will not be the last holdout. Come on Hawaii!
There was sad news this morning that my childhood hero Willie Mays had died. I came of age in the world of baseball rooting for the San Francisco Giants. My brother and I would follow their games daily on our newly acquired transistor radios, cheering on Mays and the Giants and jeering their arch rivals the LA Dodgers. For a while we lived on base, near old Candlestick Park. Once our mother took us to a game there. Our dad dropped us all off and then went to work. We were waiting in line outside of left field when a towering home run from Mays’ teammate Willie McCovey came crashing down in the parking lot near us. The game was sold out and that home run might have been all the baseball that we saw that day, except that it was a double header. After the first game, some businessmen were leaving early, and Mom scored us box seat tickets for the second game. This was my brother’s and mine first MLB game.
Today’s itinerary was nautically themed, we first visited the aquarium and then Fort Sumter. The aquarium had lots of silent fish and screaming children. Sumter is on an island, so we took a ferry there, another three-hour tour. There were no working bathrooms at the fort. This message was repeatedly drilled into us. I surmise that the real reason during the Civil War that this fort fell was not that it could not holdout any longer, but the defenders couldn’t hold it any longer. 😉
I’m Building a Hotel
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Dumb Money
Netflix has just dropped Dumb Money. This movie tells the story of the 2021 fight over the video game company GameStop. This battle began when some Wall Street insiders tried to takeout GameStop by shorting its stock. They viewed GameStop as the next Blockbuster, a zombie company operating under an out-of-date business model. They were stopped by a rag-tag army of small investors, who drove up the company’s stock price. The insiders were betting that GameStop’s stock price would go down. However, the small investors were buying up GameStop’s stock, causing its price to rise, which caused the insiders to lose a lot of their own money when their margins were called. The film’s title comes from the derisive name that Wall Street insiders label these small investors with. They are looked down on and viewed as prey. This story plays out against the backdrop of the pandemic, so there are a lot of Zoom meetings. Dumb Money is similar to another movie about Wall Street, The Big Short. That movie was about the 2008 Great Recession. In that movie there were more losers than winners, but in this movie the good guys win.
Navigating Difficult Terrain
With first the Writer’s strike and now SAG’s walkout Dan has been missing a lot of work this year. His main squeeze, his union carpenter’s job has become of little value because of these labor disputes. This has forced him to develop some side hustles. One line that he is pursuing is that of drone camera operator. This is a vocation that Dan and Britt first pursued during the pandemic. He has a line on a guy who wants to produce a fan fiction Indiana Jones movie. He spoke with Dan about using him to film a car chase scene, replete with Nazis or some such. He does not have much budget, but he does have some budget. This project is just in the talking stage, but if it were to come to fruition, it would be their first drone gig and an important addition to their resumes.
Yesterday, Dan and Britt went to Naomikong for a hike and to fly their new and much more portable little drone. Afterwards, when Dan was reviewing his footage, he showed me the above video that he had shot earlier at Joshua Tree. I was able to wheedle the above clip from him for this post. It has no sound. While they were out there Dan snagged another gig, with the outfit that runs Warhammer 40K tournaments. They do the 40K Las Vegas Open, where Dan first hooked up with them. They had asked Dan to design some new 40K terrain for them and just this week he got paid for that work. While he was hiking, they called and offered him another gig. Dan figures that if he can do the work in two weeks, he would be earning a living wage. Last night, he was so giddy about this new opportunity that it was all that we could do not to terrain on his parade.
Pac-Man
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