No, not “The Game of Life” board game: it sucks! I mean that some of the mechanics of board games are present in real life. For instance, one of the players a few nights ago made what they discovered was a bad industry placement as their first move. They discovered it a few moves later. it reminded me of buying a second investment house back in 2005. It was a bad move but maybe only bad in the context of what moves everyone else made in the game. In a different session, that same bad industry placement might have paid off big.

That house we bought? We are right now working our asses off to fix all the damage left behind by the renters so we can sell it. If we put in $8000.00 then we might be able to sell it for enough to get back that $8000.00 as well as pay off the loans and pay commission to the agents doing the selling. Without the investment now, we might not get enough to pay it off. Go figure.

That game of Brass: Lancashire was a pretty good game. One of our players likes to gripe about, or just verbally analyze, the nature of the game mechanics and the difficulty of his/her moves. One player likes to giggle with joy when taking something from someone else. I tend to work on keeping my comments to a minimum except for the occasional F-U said as jokingly as possible when someone takes an important position I wanted. I immediately, of course, apologize for acting upset and commend them on their clever move.

Life seems a bit like a board game where we don’t often see the cleverness of our own moves since we had to make them as cleverly as possible. But we do easily see the terrible ones a few turns after we make them. Then we spend a lot of time trying to counteract their ill effects.

Linkage…

On another topic; I am going to release the current 3.10 version of the Linkage program. And The Microsoft SmartScreen filter, which is rather dumb, is going to start telling people that my software is potential malware. Why? because Microsoft is fucked up and thinks it’s ok to imply untruths in order to stop having people talk about how unsecure their OS might be. Me? All I did was pay hundreds of dollars to get a new code signing certificate and since it’s through a different vendor from the last one, somehow makes MS SmartScreen think I’m now a threat. If I won a lottery, the first money I would spend would be on a class-action lawsuit to get rid of SmartScreen or at least require that it say that the software in question might be totally legitimate and that MS doesn’t actually know. or maybe just a full page add in a major paper saying that MS is hurting people with their unwarranted warnings about “we just protected your PC by telling you this legitimate signed certified software is potential malware without having any knowledge that is it a risk at all.”

Yes, I’m that angry about it right now. I paid for a security certificate and it was painful to go through the ID process with a notary and to deal with the monopoly that MS has with the security certificate companies. And it does zero to help get rid of SmartScreen warnings.