Tilton Westword's Wild West Variety Show

United Bank of Auldale (UBA) It's been 17 years since I released my second fan mission (FM) for the video game Thief II: The Metal Age. The FM was posted on thiefmissions.com (Cheap Thief Missions) first on Christmas Eve, then mirrored elsewhere, like The Keep of Metal and Gold (KOMAG). There were a lot of things I didn't like about the mission, but everything worked as it should have, with the exception of two items, so that's not bad. One item was a key that should have appeared on a guard's belt but was invisible in the game. That didn't stop anyone from completing the mission, though. The other issue is a set of doors on the third floor of the cafe that disappear when opened. I don't remember them doing that during the final game test, but strange things happen when you zip a file and upload it to a server. When I started building UBA, it wasn't supposed to be Christmas-themed but ended up that way. I don't even recall what I was thinking exactly whe...

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall One of the best thrift-store finds of 2023 for me was a 303 page book about a man Hell bound for glory and his eventual mental health breakdown near the end of a race around the world in a small trimaran known as the Teignmouth Electron. The race officially began in late 1968 and ended tragically in July of 1969 about eight months after Donald Crowhurst began his journey. The biography makes no attempt from the very beginning to hide the fact that he died on during the voyage most likely from suicide. Then ensuing investigative story attempts to piece together as much of the truth as possible from the beginning to the end. From the time the idea was conceived to the time he set sail it was fairly easy for the authors to deduce the land based events by using documents, photography, film and interviews. Once Crowhurst left the pier all bets were off as to what happened during the entire voyage. Using radio m...