Category Archives: Games

Games

Retirement the Margaritaville Way | The New Yorker

At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it’s five o’clock everywhere. Letter from Daytona Beach…

By Nick Paumgarten, March 21, 2022

A beach scene with relaxed elders.
“We like the idea of being happy,” the head of the Jimmy Buffett-branded communities said of the residents’ attitude.Illustration by Nada Hayek

The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand. He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”

I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.” His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The Bar & Chill was open to the evening. A gentle breeze fanned the lanai. On a flat-screen, the Providence Friars led the Vermont Catamounts by a few buckets. A bartender brought a Perfect Margarita in a plastic cup.

The bald man, drinking a vodka soda, said his name was Phil. Phil Murphy, from Arlington, Massachusetts, aged sixty-four. Formerly a research director at Forrester, retired since 2015. “I was in the air for twenty years,” he said. He looked and sounded less like my idea of a Parrothead, as Jimmy Buffett’s diehard fans are called, than like Mike Ehrmantraut, the melancholic fixer in “Breaking Bad.”

Standing off his left shoulder, his wife, Betty, red hair cut short, added a dash of urbanity, a spritz of Allison Janney. Phil and Betty had organized an emergency fund for the restaurant’s staff during its Covid shutdown. One of their friends declared them “the king and queen of the Bar & Chill.”

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/retirement-the-margaritaville-way/

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life

Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about …

By Simon Parkin, Sat 10 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT

Virtual worlds: Second Life and Metaverse. Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian

On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier.

Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.

It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/10/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life

Super Bowl LVIII

From SB site…

Date February 11, 2024

Event Starts: TBA

On Sale: TBA

Key Link: SB LVIII Committee


Key Link: Allegiant Stadium, Super Bowl site

COUNTDOWN TO SB LVIII

1707695940

  days

  hours  minutes  seconds

until

Super Bowl LVIII

Baseball Opening Day, and the Library Adds MLB History Online | Timeless | Library of Congress

By Neely Tucker, March 30, 2023

A “Bull” Durham Baseball Guide, 1911. The Baseball Publishing Co.

The following guest post was written by Peter Armenti and Darren Jones, research specialists in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack — it’s Major League Baseball’s Opening Day!

To celebrate the start of the 2023 season, the Library is pleased to announce a new digital collection: Early Baseball Publications.

The collection, which will grow over time, provides full-text digitized access to more than 120 early baseball publications.

The initial release includes a large selection of 19th- and early 20th-century annual baseball guides, including many volumes of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide, one of the premier baseball publications of its day. Also included are rule books, record books, scorekeeping guides and books on how to hit and play different positions.

Source: Baseball Opening Day, and the Library Adds MLB History Online | Timeless

Look Inside Vic’s, the New Jazz Lounge and Italian Bistro in Las Vegas – Eater Vegas

Seventy years after Vegas Vic first appeared downtown, the neon cowboy gets a lounge of his own

by Janna Karel, Feb 24, 2023, 3:55pm PST

Vic’s
Louiie Victa

Seventy years after the neon cowboy, Vegas Vic, first started waving his neon thumb over visitors’ heads in downtown Las Vegas, the family that still owns his trademark has opened a jazz lounge in his name.

In opening Vic’s, the father-son duo of Paul and Chris Lowden are adding one more offering to downtown’s cultural epicenter, in the form of a vibey lounge for watching live performances over Italian food.

Located inside Symphony Park and next to the Smith Center of Performing Arts and the Discovery Children’s Museum, Vic’s is a single-story venue with a bar, sports lounge, and main dining room for taking in live music over dinner.

Designed for live jazz and blues, the main dining room is built to scatter and absorb sound. The tables are lightly padded to reduce the clatter of plates and silverware and they fan out away from the stage, providing a view of the action to every seat, booth, and setee.

Source: Look Inside Vic’s, the New Jazz Lounge and Italian Bistro in Las Vegas – Eater Vegas

Disney’s Most Groundbreaking and History-Making Moments of the Last 100 Years

This year, Disney is celebrating its 100th anniversary of storytelling and entertainment. See the company’s most iconic moments in history in preparation for the company’s centennial celebration.

By Staff Author, Published on February 16, 2023 01:06 PM

Photo: Everett Collection

Walt Disney and his brother Roy Disney pen a deal with Margaret Winkler, one of the leading distributors in animation at the time, to fund 12 episodes of the Alice Comedies. Known at the time as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, this contract is viewed as the start of the Walt Disney Company, as it’s known today. Walt went on to write and produce all 57 episodes of the series that launched his career.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: Disney’s Most Groundbreaking and History-Making Moments of the Last 100 Years