Will's Good Idea for the First Week of 2022, also January

Last night Hamas fired some rockets at Israel. Israel blew up some stuff in Hamasland. This is as good an opportunity as any to remind reader(s) that one should avoid the term 'Palestinian'. We hesitate to even write that word. There are no 'Palestinians', but a collection of disparate desert tribes. Only Arafat* could keep them all straight, one of the reasons these people are so disunified today. That word is a social construct invented by white supremacists to deny the Jew's historic and cultural ties to the Holyland. Use Gazan and West Bank Person (WBP) instead. 

What Will's Playing, more Star Wars Squadrons: it's...okaaaay (uptalked). We keep waiting for this game to get better and really wow us. We're not wowed. Mostly we just fly around blowing up the stuff the game tells us to blow up. Back in the 90's, X-Wing was better. So was Wing Commander for Sega CD. So far Star Wars Squadrons seems like a souped-up version of the latter. Maybe we're just cynical and jaded. [Maybe?-Ed] That being said, Star Wars Squadrons is a nice distraction during the afternoon dead time. Any of you young game-heads [game-heads?-Ed] have any suggestions?

Yesterday we opened up The Final Storm for the first time in a couple of months. 60,000 words. What a mess. We have written the British, Italian and Australian attack scenes. We still need to write what we're writing for Task Force 60 and the SAS attack. If you people haven't figured out where the SAS is headed by now...We stole the idea from Ian Slater.

Ah, Slater. We read him 30 years ago, our senior year in high school. Back in the day there wasn't a lot of WWIII lit. Anyone who was around back in the 80s knows who were about to mention: Hacket, Clancy, Bond, Coyle, Peters...and then there was Ian Slater's series. Slater wrote an opening trilogy and just kept going. The later books all but ignored everything that happened in the first three. 

[You're going to get all nostalgic for 1992, aren't you?-Ed]

We promise not to do it too bad.

The plan for January is as follows. We'll finish up 76 and The Weser, and clean up the Italian, British and Aussie scenes in The Final Storm.  

And God laughed.

*Gay. Died of AIDS.

End of the Year News Wrap

We have completed virtually all of the household tasks Mrs. Stroock assigned to us before fleeing with the children to Indiana. This includes painting, light socket and electrical outlet plate replacement, more painting, patching up floor scratches...Will be picking them up at Newark Liberty tomorrow. 

We have lots of Covid here in New Jersey: 'New Jersey on Wednesday reported another 20,483 COVID-19 cases, shattering the record for the most positive tests the state has announced in any single day during the 22-month-old pandemic. The state also reported another 50 confirmed deaths just two days before New Year’s Eve will be celebrated.' We see lots of masks at the grocery store, Home Depot, and the Donut, but few at the gym. This makes sense. Gyms are incredibly clean and filled with healthy people. The only place we've worn a mask is our cardiologist last week. They made us. We are reliably informed by a high ranking source that the Donut will be closing the front for a while. 

In Israel a portrait of a healthy, optimistic nation. Quoth the Jerusalem Post: 'Israel's population grew by about 160,000 people (a growth of 1.7%) in 2021, reaching about 9,450,000 people as it enters 2022, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) announced on Thursday. As of the end of 2021, 6.98 million (73.9%) of Israel's residents were Jewish, about two million were Arab and 472,000 were from other sectors, including non-Arab Christians and residents not classified by religion in the population registry. Most of the population growth in the country this year was natural (83%), while the rest (17%) came from immigration.'

What Will's Watching, The Book of Boba Fett Episode 1: Unfocussed and dull. The show opens with Boba Fett on Jaba the Hutt's throne but doesn't yet tell us how he got there. Then there are flashbacks, one back to Attack of the Clones. Don't worry, it didn't get that bad. Episode 1 felt like two episodes cut in half and spliced together. Could just be a clunker. It happens. Afterall Arctic Storm isn't Polish Storm's equal. Still, very disappointing. 1/4

What Will's playing, Star Wars Squadrons. After getting the girls a PS4 for Xmas we got ourselves a Star Wars game. Reminder, our last video game system was Sega CD. We are impressed with the graphics and did not appreciate just how much modern videogames are part story and part game. The play is okay, but Star Wars Squadrons has the same drawbacks as every other jet/space fighter game we ever played. One is flying around in circles trying to get that damn fighter in one's crosshairs. We just wish we were thrilled the way we were with X-Wing back in the early 90s. Now there was a game. Maybe we're just 48 and not 20.