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Leave a comment on Advent day 20 and we’re going to a Porto

December 20, 2024

10:04 pm

advent, cruise, travel

Hello everyone,

Back to cruise ! First though, what’s behind today’s door ?

Picture. It's our advent collection of all the models, plus the red dwagon on the right, in front of the snow scene. The latest minifigure is standing on top of the large green d20 again. They are in a full set of red armour with a face covering helmet. They are holding a black staff vertically, it has violet cones on the end.

There we go, it’s a stormtrooper melee staff person guard.

We’ll see how far this one goes again, I’m in that psychological shutdown mode again at the moment, because work is done for the year and I’m unconsciously going into rest mode plus a few of the aches have been maybe aggravated today (I have the numb fingers again). Plus I’m still worried about a few very special people.

To a better time and the cruise ?

Picture. We're on the cruise ship, looking over the side. The focus is on the little red dwagon, sitting on a sun lounger. Behind is the white painted metal and the wooden top of the rail at the edge of the ship. Behind and left is a red rubber life saving ring, on the rail. Out of focus through the rail are the buildings of the city.

That’s Porto in the background there. We were docked up in the cruise terminal, just about in walking distance of parts of the main city. A very short shuttle bus run took us to the outsides of the terminal and the start of a little wander.

Picture. We're looking back at a walkway. Our little red dwagon is perched on the edge, with a white painted fence behind. In the background is our ship, with the Bridge end pointed our way.

Dwagon finding the best places to pose in again. The Portuguese Navy ship was in port here and I did actually have a better picture than I thought …

Picture. We're looking across the calm water of the harbour. Docked up is a blue container ship on the left and a grey Navy warship in the centre. The skyline is a mix of cranes and is dominated by a pair of tower buildings with orange faces and black edges.

There we go, Portuguese frigate pennant number F333 NRP Bartolomeu Dias hanging around there and wanting to see if I could get a better peek gave me my choice of which direction to start walking in when ashore.

And so off I wander past a port side area with lots of equivalents of our sea side fish and chip shops. I suspect the fare would have been rather better, at least according to all of the sea birds lined up on the buildings opposite … waiting their chance to pounce. Like the young lady on a lad who I suspect was greatly enjoying the type of attention she was giving him. He wasn’t being given much of a chance to escape and I don’t think “escape” was on his mind at all :-D.

That wasn’t the only ship that caught the eye, we had a ferry transporter docked up next to us.

Picture. We're looking out of the calm waters of the harbour towards a big ship with grey lower and white upper. The Bridge section is up front and there is a yellow and blue funnel aft.

Not sure what they were doing with that one. It’d be a transporter vessel and they were moving lorries around on the top deck. Cue the mystified feeling because they’d bring a lorry to the top (they could drive around inside), park the lorry and its trailer … and the the lorry would go back downstairs again.

Anyway, back to shore and off I pop to explore, see if I could get a better view of the Navy ship and I find myself being led by the curiosity …

Picture. We're looking out over the best. Dwagon is sitting looking at us on the blocky sea wall. The beach is to the left. People are scattered around, including sitting on the wall. In the distance, our cruise ship facing us and the long ferry transporter is side on to us. The sky is somewhat clear, with thin white cloud.

It was a good little wander, although I didn’t head into too many of the shops. Just a fish market where Dwagon was way more interested in looking at the fare than the film. I find myself nearing the end of the contents of my water bottle* and at the beach. Good little wander.

*I’ve been skating on a balance in my metabolism I think. I’ve been getting subjected to heavy cramping and one thing that helps keep that at bay is staying hydrated. So if I run through all of my water supply, that’s a big sign to start heading back before I start getting into cramping trouble … which leads to torn muscles and being restricted on how much I can move around.

Picture. We're on the open top deck of the cruise ship, looking out over the rail towards the breakwater that marks the edge of the port. There is a red tinge on the horizon below where the sun is reflecting off gently rippled water. We can see the sun's glow behind thickening cloud.

Time to head on though and the sun was starting to retreat when we made our own retreat from Porto. But not before seeing a container ship do the naval equivalent of a three point turn to dock up at the container area.

Picture. We're looking out across the gently rippled water of the harbour towards a container ship to the left and the low buildings to the right. The ship is long low and blue, with a tall white area at the back, to right of shot. The deck is stacked with mostly blue containers.

There we go. This is after she turned in place to then finally back up to get alongside at the area to the right. Next day was a sea day, which meant a chance to enjoy a sunrise …

Picture. We're on the ship again, looking out through the rail at a lovely sunrise with the orange glow dominating the horizon, diffusing through the thin cloud. In the foreground, Dwagon is on the sun loungers again in silhouette.

Sort out some of the pictures …

Picture. Dwagon is sitting on the laptop looking at the screen. There are a couple of file list windows stacked and there is another window in the centre showing two progress bars as the pictures copy from camera to laptop. Top left, we see a picture of dwagon, sitting in front of a bag, it's another version of the beach picture from earlier.

That’s part of the process I do for picking out the pictures. You can probably guess that I take a lot of pictures and only a selection are ones that I’d consider showing anyone or posting anywhere. So I copy all of the pictures to the laptop and then split them out by day. Then I’ll go through them picking out the best ones. That means that for the Mystery Cruise, I had a series of folders with names like “Mon 18”, “Sat 16”, “Fri 15” and corresponding ones called “Mon 18 – K”, “Sat 16 – K” and “Fri 15 – K” with the K being for Keeper.

All that done and it’s time for lunch and the Poolside bar did a lovely fish and chips. And then more general chill out and relaxing before enjoying a sunset as spectacular as the sunrise.

Picture. We're looking out over the ship rail again. Dwagon is in the accustomed perch of a sun lounger. The sun is just hitting the horizon and giving the sky a gorgeous orange glow.

Time for me to head off like the sun did here a whole bunch of hours ago. Good night everyone, have a lovely timezone.

Advent day 19 and it’s crowded in the hangar bay

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December 19, 2024

10:15 pm

advent, books, games

Hello everyone,

Quick one again – internet feels better but I’ve had the old warning sign from my hand which means I probably shouldn’t type much … What’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at our advent scene again, with 18 models and dwagon scattered on the snow scene. On top of a red d6 on top of the big green d20 is a small fighter ship model. It has a central pilot pod, with a grey and green wing on each side.

Oops. Learning again not to press ctrl+v instead of ctrl+c when copying out the alt-text. (Random aside time!) It’s been a pretty useful skill to learn that, making the alt-text. The intention is to make the site more inclusive to people who can’t make out the detail in the pictures. Alt-text is descriptive words that you add, which gets picked up by screen reader software that’ll read out the text on the page. You’ll see it if you hover over the picture.

Why has it been more useful ?

Often, you’re not supposed to or aren’t allowed to take pictures of things. I mentioned spyware on mobiles last time, it extends to the phone providers insisting that you really want to upload all of your pictures to their servers. Ok, so what if you point the camera at something and capture something sensitive ? Oops. It’s now on Google’s or Apple’s servers too. The trick is to not point the camera at the sensitive things. But … when you’re the one person sent to look at something and you need to fully report back what you’ve seen to the others who aren’t able to go ? That’s the other way alt-text comes in really handy.

It lets you paint that picture of what you’re seeing in a concise descriptive language to pass on to those who can’t see what you’re seeing. But … it also trains you in observation to have you pick up the detail that you might have otherwise passed over with your eyes.

Anyway, it does mean that I need to pop the alt-text here in two places to make it work.

It’s a really valuable habit to pick up, because it really does help people out although I have been getting a bit lazy with the advent scene alt-text lately.

Other news before I disappear today …

Game screenshot. Truck Simulator. Our green truck is parked up off the side of a snow covered road curling off to the left. It has a trailer with pictures of letters on it. In the distance are tree covered hills, there are snow covered buildings of a village at the base of the hills.

Truck Game is doing a winter event at the moment, where you do short trips to and from the Winter Wonderland zone, added in for the season. It’s a good little variation in to the game, including having driving on snow effects.

And I think I need to rest that hand and disappear into book again. After enjoying A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher, I’m on a John Scalzi book again now. It’s The Collapsing Empire and it’s got a promising introduction to its space opera universe told in Mr Scalzi’s easy to read and very enjoyable style.

Later everyone, have a great rest of evening.

Advent Day 18 and U need better internet

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December 18, 2024

10:57 pm

games

advent, games

Hello everyone,

Short one again today kinda out of necessity because my internet is giving some problems ! Sometimes it seems like my internet can’t handle cold weather and … yep it’s on the RCS Partial Service and SYNC Timing Synchronisation failure warnings again, which means I’m running both laptop and desktop off the mobile phone hotspot and there’s a stream running on the laptop.

Before I ramble too much, what’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at our advent scene again and the collection of models has been joined by a small spacecraft on top of the big d20. The spacecraft is white, with yellow and blue trim. The main part is aft, with two long wings going directly forwards making a U shape. 2 pairs of engines are at the back.

There we are, it’s a U Wing transport spacecraft from the excellent Rogue One movie. It could actually be the best Star Wars movie for me. It just made sense from start to finish, it avoided a lot of the mysticism of the Force which is literally handwavium. You could identify with all of the characters and they were acted so completely brilliantly.

Gonna have to watch it again soon. If you haven’t seen it for any reason, I’d thoroughly recommend finding a way to see it. It transcends itself past the source material.

Situation I mentioned yesterday – I don’t have any updates yet, which I’m taking as a good or at least neutral sign. I’m still feeling very broken mentally and physically at the moment but my concern is without rather than within. I’ll be ok although I do need rest, which is why that concern is pointing outwards rather than inwards.

Other stuff …

I’ll upgrade the mobile phone over the break. I can’t trust it any more, I’ll occasionally open it to find that some of the settings have gone weird. Like a Google authentication text disabling the notifications on incoming text messages, so I didn’t see some important info until I looked in the text messages area (by incidental look). It has some other quirks as well that may be interfering with normal operation.

It’s a Pixel 4 from 5 years ago, it’s done pretty well and it was a great move to go to it from a Samsung Galaxy 7 which was absolutely riddled with malware and intrusionware from Samsung. I believe they toned that down after the Galaxy S7 but I’ve got no reason to go outside Pixel, so I’ll replace the Pixel 4 with a Pixel 9.

Like, it’s doing well at the moment by hotspotting for both laptop and desktop and providing an active local area network link between the two. But I’m not going to push it too much by pulling cruise pictures over from the laptop today.

I’ll hold off for now on the desktop PC upgrade. Part to ease out the spending a little bit, part so I can see what happens with the graphics card market next month. I may well go for the option of doing a core (Processor, memory, case, mainboard) upgrade to go to Windows 11, while keeping the current 3060Ti graphics card. It’s still pretty good for power moving the pixels around the screen.

About that …

Picture. We're looking at a mostly green background poster thing showing how much I've been playing games this year. The title is "Sleepydwagonman's steam replay 2024". There is a big 34 games played above panels showing 393 achievements, 795 sessions and 18 new games. 5 panels below show my most played games.

I think that shows that when I start gaming, it’ll be long sessions. Someone on a discord is showing 1600 sessions, so they must be swapping between games a lot. I suppose each Skyrim session shows up as well and those can be only about a minute if I’m messing about with my set of mods.

I left out what the games were in the alt-text, so here we go for them by play time :

80% Idle Champions – this is an idle game where you set it up and let it run in the background. It kinda has story links in it but the main aim is to complete the adventures and make all the numbers go up, with your adventurers steadily getting stronger and stronger. Not quite sure why I still play it to be honest, maybe a habit. This one has accounted for 194 of those 393 achievements.

11% in Little Big Workshop – I love this cute easy to play factory building game and can easily forget about the world for many hours by opening it in the evening and then realising that the sun is coming up. It’s also 80% off until the next daily reset, which I think is going to be the start of a Steam sale anyway … so it’ll probably go off discount straight back on discount.

Motorsport Manager comes in at 4% of time played – this is a racing team simulator game, where you set the strategy and watch your drivers attempt to go around the track faster than everyone else. I’m currently in another megacampaign which has reached the late 2050s. This game caught me when it came out because it did everything so, so right … and gave believable races. Whereas I just bounced off the recent F1 Manager series, maybe they’ll get those right by the end of that contract.

Euro Truck Simulator has had a late revival with about 1% – I came back into this one in October. It’s another easy to play game where I’ll pick a route to go down and just attempt to chill while going from place to place. It has the progression factor that I look for, in that as I get money in the game, I can add more trucks to the company empire. I think I’m back to 15 now since restarting.

Last up for Steam is Aliens Dark Descent at 1% again – this is a real time strategy type game, set on a planet in the Alien universe. Big scary monsters are out to turn everyone into more big scary monsters but you’ve also got to contend with cultists and corporates. It’s a great game for the mechanics it introduced and the tension it builds. It does have bugs … but it’s another one that I enjoyed finishing. Apparently in just under 60 hours.

And that’s it for Steam – honourable mentions go to American Truck Simulator, the 2 Deus Ex games (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided), Cobalt Core was a fun find, Rover Mechanic Simulator is a nice little take stuff apart, fix stuff game. Dredge is in there with a bit of time spent on the latest DLC expansion and I’ll keep dipping into and out of the old Battletech game.

There’s more about the Steam Stuff at the link.

Outside of Steam, I did go back into World of Warcraft for a while … although I think I may have broken that addiction again and should probably either go back in again or cancel the subscription.

Then there’s also Elite Dangerous, which I did enjoy dipping back into again earlier this month. Warcraft and Elite aren’t launched via Steam for me, so the hours don’t add up there.

And the highlight for me of this year was Star Wars Outlaws. It has been criticised for bugs, which I only saw a couple of. It was a delight being immersed in the Star Wars universe doing shenanigans with the main character and companion. It was a weird feeling not really wanting to run it through to the finish of the story because I wanted to keep playing … but I was on a time limit due to not wanting to pay the asking price, with me playing it on the monthly subscription.

And that’s it for me for today ! Have a lovely evening everyone. Be well, hope you and yours are doing ok.

Advent Day 17 and just a Jedi today

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December 17, 2024

8:26 pm

advent

Hello everyone,

Just a very quick one today because I’m still feeling very strained … What’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at the advent collection. The addition today is a minifigure with wavy brown hair. He's wearing a green jumper wit ha low domed building on it and two red suns in the sky.

There we are, another minifigure today and a Luke Skywalker. Complete with gloved hand there and remembering the moisture farm on Tatooine with the jumper there.

I think that’s about all I have for today, although it was good seeing the Xmas vibes in a very short Truck Game session earlier.

Game screenshot. Truck Game. We're looking at a night time scene into a town centre. Buildings flank the outside of the square. There is a lit up and decorated tree at the far end. The ground is snow covered with low hut buildings in the square. Our truck is in the lower right.

I didn’t have much more available in me than just a fairly quick there and back to the seasonal event zone to do a couple of deliveries. Wasn’t feeling the vibes due to the exhaustion and being concerned about people.

Back tomorrow and I’ll summon some good vibes into another cruise port post. Be well everyone, have a good evening.

Advent Day 16 and we’re going Ferrol

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December 16, 2024

10:08 pm

advent, travel

Hello everyone,

Still in the struggle but seeing what we can do to work through it … What’s behind door 16 ?

Picture. We're looking at the advent scene with the collection of models scattered throughout. The addition today is a mostly white spaceship shaped in a diamond shape. There are windows in front, we can't see the engines at the back.

Yep. Still in that state of exhaustion, although I think I did actually get some sleep last night. Soreness is still in there though, looking forwards to the winter break.

Ferrol ? Time for more cruise …

Friday saw us docked up in Al Ferrol, on the Northern coast of Spain. I might have to bang out fairly quickly and do simpler alt-text because my right arm is not particularly happy with me today.

Picture. We're looking out over a port and in the distance, low buildings of a coastal city. More ships are in the background. The sea part of the harbour is to the right of picture. The sky is cloudy.

Very pleasant chill city. One thing I did notice there were the wind turbines … and there was a lot more of that on the way out of the city. It’s missing on the alt text but there are is a big array of very long blades, all stacked up with each other. Beside those, are the box sections of the actual generators and there are what I think are the bits that link the generators to the blades. There were huge stacks of these all around the port, as well as that not so little collection there.

To the port ! I had a little wander but didn’t really know what I was seeing but … I was drawn inevitably to their naval museum.

Picture. We're looking out over a stone paved courtyard with buildings to the left. In the centre of the courtyard to the left is a big ship's propeller. In the distance is the various levels of a ship's mast, covered with protrusions and aerials and antennas, with a big plate of a radar in the middle.

Complete with scalped aircraft carrier. Not something you see every day. If you’re in the area, I’d thoroughly recommend going to see the Naval Museum there. It starts through the Spanish Navy ships in the age of sail, goes through the early 20th century warships and goes right through to a model of their latest destroyer.

Picture. We're looking at a model of a navy ship in a glass display case. The ship is grey, with a black stripe at the waterline and red below. The bow is to the right and going backwards, there is a naval gun, missile silo, then the Bridge with the main sensors and radios mast behind. Aft of that are engine exhausts and a flat flight deck is at the back.

The pennant number in the middle there is F105 and tells us that this is a model of the Spanish Navy ship Cristóbal Colón. More at the wiki. She was commissioned in 2012. Part of me automatically critiques the design of these ships (see various comments ref ship nerd) but it looks like that ship could do a seriously good job as part of a fleet. Good to see these on our side.

Picture. We're looking at a couple of older navy ships in display cases. The one nearest has a black upper hull below cream superstructure. There are 3 funnels, 2 masts and a gun up front in a round white turret.

Oops. Lost a bit there as I was rudely interrupted by needing to log in again. Not sure why Bluehost is doing that every two days at the moment. I should probably log in around lunchtime sometime so the timer is set different.

Anyway ! Two early century navy ships, where the engines were taking up quite a bit of the ship and they were limited to just a small number of not too effective guns.

Picture. We're looking down an alleyway between two sets of two story buildings. Large ship anchors are stood up on each side.

They must have done well though, look at all the trophy anchors in the collection ! This was also the port that serenaded us on the way out with the bagpipe band. That was a lovely way to prepare for the day’s sailaway from a pretty coastal city.

Picture. We're looking out over fairly calm but rippled water towards a hill, where buildings of the city are there on a couple of levels. It looks like the buildings are climbing upwards to the right and then curling round to the left.

Good to see all that greenery in there around the buildings. This sailaway saw me starting to watch on the Promenade deck …

Picture. We're looking out over water that is just being disturbed by the wake of a pilot boat showing us the way to the open sea. The sun is up in the top left and is reflecting off the water. There is a narrow gap between far hills on the left and closer hills to the right.

We were heading off down that channel there. Here’s our pilot boat.

Picture. We're looking out over the water again, towards the gap to the sea over on the left with hills on the right. There is a little boat in the centre, leading the way out to sea for us. Their wake is making waves in the water.

Must have been pushing it a bit with the wake that they’re generating there.

Picture. We're looking back down the channel of sea that we came down. The surface of the water is disturbed by our wake. We can see a narrow break between hills to the left and right. Beyond the break, we can just see the cranes and buildings of the city.

This is where I found myself up on the Foredeck part of the ship (wasn’t open much) and as the ship turned, we had a chance to see back the way we’d come. Good place to be, nice and chill which was what I was needing at that point.

Oh ! This was where I was attempting to get pictures of a cooperative flag as well :-D. This is about as good as it got …

Picture. We're looking out over the back of the ship, with sun loungers arranged on the deck. At the back of the ship, there is a flagpole flying a flag which is 3 quarters red, with a white cross. In the upper left is the blue and yellow emblem of the Fred Olsen line.

That’ll do :-).

Time to hit post though and ration out what remains of my typing time. Have a good evening everyone, see you tomorrow.

Advent Day 15 and it’s a struggle again

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December 15, 2024

8:04 pm

advent

Hello everyone,

Probably a short one today again because I’m feeling struggles both within and without … What’s behind the door ?

Picture. We're looking at the advent collection again, this time to addition is a fellow in white body armour and white helmet, both armour and helmet have a blue stripe of trim.

There we go, stormtrooper today.

Why the struggles ? It does feel like it’s coming from all sides at the moment, with work and family stuff that will definitely not be going here.

It’s definitely coming from within, because I’ve been feeling that I’m nearing the end of a very long and very frayed rope. I think the big part of it is psychological, because I’m finding it very hard to find joy in things. Perhaps that’s a sign of a depression creeping in there ? Maybe.

What I have been finding cheering me up is how people were finding things like the Dwagon on Tour pictures. It was really lovely seeing the various interactions popping up with those with people giving the hearts, the likes, the occasional omgs and general seeing that other people were really enjoying seeing what I’d been posting. Kinda makes you want to disappear out of the world again for a little while and go some place to let me send out more Dwagon on Tour pictures.

Hopefully at some point next year, I’ve run the annual leave down to about the minimum I can carry over. That refreshes at the end of April, so it needs to cover Xmas, Easter and I’ll need to disappear from work for a week around Feb as well due to …

I’ve been in burn out for a very long time now. The first symptoms really kicked in around covid times, with things like the sketching just ending. I haven’t sketched in years now, although a couple of emotes happened when idea plus can I do it combined at just the right time.

At the moment, it’s manifesting both mentally and physically. It doesn’t feel like my brain’s running on all of its cores at the moment, plus I’m even more absent minded than usual. Physically, I’m having increasingly sore hips, what feels like a void in my lower back and the injury I did to my right knee during the cruise hasn’t recovered yet. Add to that, the shoulder joining in and an elbow that’s making me shy away from losing myself in games like the Truck games.

And all that together means that while I look at the new games and think I’d maybe enjoy playing them, I’m not at a spot where I want to learn those games.

It’s not at a point where I would consider myself physically disabled, plus I was able to walk for around 15,000 step days during the cruise. But that constant low level pain does get to you after a while.

Last bit before I fetch my dinner which has the timer bell starting to go …

Any more of you feeling especially exhausted at the moment ? I’ve had that for quite a long of time. I keep hearing it from so many people as well. It doesn’t feel like it’s just me at the moment. It feels like a more generalised malaise has settled in where everyone is struggling to find the energy to do even just those basic tasks. And that’s not just for me in too many years to count, it’s younger people in their 20s and 30s as well.

If you recognise that in yourself, then I hope you can find that energy to get at least some of the things done that your brain is telling you needs to get done.

Another aspect of it for me is that I find it very difficult asking for help. I don’t take time off sick, I haven’t been back to a doctors in years and I probably need to do that for both an allergy test to finally confirm what I can and cannot have and to see if there’s an answer for why I’m so exhausted so much of the time. I can still start doing something and keep going until it’s done … but when that need to finish is over, I’ll go splat.

This isn’t intended as me reaching out and asking for help. I don’t like to impose like that on other people. But what I will say there is … whenever I see an interaction with something I’ve done, it gives me that little bit of Happy that I struggle to generate from within. It tells me that I do things that people like, that people want to engage with what I do and that people care.

If you’re reading this and are wondering if that means you – DEFINITELY YES it does.

I hope you have people looking out for you as well. Hopefully back with a happier post tomorrow but I think I needed to safety valve out some of my feelings like this tonight.

Picture. A grumpy looking small cute red dragon is sitting down looking at us. The captions are "I'm done adulting, let's be dragons"

I kinda wanted to end on a cheery happy meme but that counts I think. Where to for Dwagon on Tour 2025 ? We shall see.

Advent day 14 and I have left it late for a port visit

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December 14, 2024

11:51 pm

advent, travel

Hello everyone,

I may have got a bit distracted by doing some more Euro Truck Sim 2 and left it a little late :-D. What’s behind door number 14 ?

Picture. We're looking at our advent collection, with the dwagon on the right. The new model is a small square grey fighter craft with short wings at the back.

Apparently the latest one is a Mandalorian Fighter spaceship. See earlier comments about not having seen any of the latest Star Wars output on the telly :-D. I’ve been missing a few other things as well, like the various new Star Trek (to be honest I was put off that a little by Picard season 1) and I’d like to see For All Mankind at some point.

Port visit ?

Thursday saw us come in to …

Picture. We're looking at a sign, with Gijon written in a fancy script in red letters, held up by a rectangular red frame. In the background is a marina with calm water and an array of boats.

Gijon ! This was about the point where I was starting to call the trip Dwagon On Tour and I picked up from ideas from not quite sure where else to sneak the little fellow into pictures wherever I could.

Slightly awkward start because there was unexpected traffic slowing down the buses that were taking us from the ship to the city centre (some ports don’t allow people to wander around in them) but it was really good getting ashore for a wander after being a bit wobbly during the Bay of Biscay crossing the day before.

First order of business was to find somewhere with a good vantage point. Gijon is built on the north coast of Spain, so because the world is how it is, it has coastal fortifications to defend it. Definite wake up call for my level of unfitness to leg it up to the top of that hill :-D. But I did get my first good picture of the outsides of Borealis.

Picture. We're looking out over a slightly choppy watered stretch of water towards the port on the other side. Our white upper, blue lower ship is visible behind the port buildings. There is a hill behind, with sphere buildings dotted around at the top.

Wonder what those spheres were on top of the hill.

Picture. It's a bit of a grey day but we can clearly see a castle gatehouse style building opposite with sandy coloured brick. Two large square towers flank a 5 arched gateway below a 2 storey building joining the towers. To the right, a statue of a fellow holding up a cross. Far right, a modern grey tower building with blue windows. There is a road in front of us.

This saw our first taste of the architecture style as well, with those old castle style roofed buildings there in the older style, with the modern look creeping in there to the right too. And a statued person giving a greeting. I think that’s a greeting.

Also the England in New Zealand test match cricket just swapped over to England batting and I’m struggling to shift my “yay he’s out!” over to “yay our guy just hit a boundary”.

Picture. We're looking at buildings in an L forming two sides of a paved square. There are arches below and two storeys of windows above. The arches are sandy, the buildings above are red. — You could have a game of cricket in that space

They do like their open areas with the pedestrians well isolated from the traffic. Possibly because the Spanish drivers didn’t seem too averse to adding a little blood red to their car paint, although I don’t think they’re quite as bad as Bristol drivers who will back up to make sure after running you over.

I like my city, honest. (No I don’t 😀 )

I was still feeling a little delicate so I didn’t stay out that long but it was good finding the marina again after having a little walk through the city shopping area.

Picture. We're looking out over a very crowded marina at all of the boats. Motorboats are closer, with a large cluster of masts at the back and left. In front, a sea wall with the red dwagon on it.

There we go. Little Red Dwagon enjoying me enjoying see all the boats. It was a good city for boats. And it was a lot more sheltered in that marina than it was outside …

Picture. We're looking out over the area of the city where it meets the sea. Tall buildings are crammed in beyond a short dark wall holding the sea back. We can see white waves battering the wall.

Bit wild and I wouldn’t have been wanting to be leaning over that wall without a raincoat :-D.

I also hadn’t eaten anything for almost all of the day before so it was good to get back on board for a bit to eat. I hadn’t been actually sick with my sea sickness, just wanting to completely avoid food so that I could stay fairly horizontal and eating isn’t exactly compatible with that.

Back to the port ? It would have been good to explore for a little bit longer but …

Picture. It's dark night time and we're looking out over the water towards the bright white lights of the port. Alongside, we can see a red tanker being loaded by a yellow crane.

Back to the ship and preparing for a night time departure. And incidentally, a first really good chance to play with my new 50mm large aperture lens … the one I bought for looking at stars, where it’s been continual cloud since !

Picture. It's dark, we're looking out over the water towards the port. However close in there is a long breakwater made of stone and brick.

It was doing super well at picking out the detail too. I could barely see any of that breakwater there with Mk1 Eyeball.

(looks at time) I better hit post ! More tomorrow.

Have a lovely day everyone.

Advent day 13 and we nearly caused a security incident

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December 13, 2024

11:09 pm

music

advent, music

Hello everyone,

I’ll get to that oopsie later. First … Day 13 !

Picture. We're looking at our advent scene. Dwagon is helping on the left by allowing a couple of the models to be on top of him. The new piece is a white and red shuttle. It's on top of a big d20 with the 13 showing.

That’s Ahsoka Tano’s Jedi shuttle there. Not from a Star Wars thing I’ve watched, it’s from one of the Disney series. I have to admit shifting from being a total Star Wars addict to being completely out of touch now with what’s on the streaming services. I saw those as another unnecessary expense that I didn’t have the time to actually get the value out of. I’ll catch up on series telly but I’m a bit behind on the recorded stuff.

I think my losing touch started with the deletion of the Expanded Universe books from the established canon, with those being swept aside in favour of movies that turned out to be … a bit awful, especially when episode 8 ignored a lot of the established Star Wars universe rules (gotta be consistent with how your universe works, even in fantasy) and then episode 9 deleted a lot of the promising threads from the movie before. I was unimpressed and they didn’t exactly make me interested in signing up to the streaming service to watch more.

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. We're in shadow, looking into a ravine with terrain walls to left and right. We're standing beside a speeder bike, looking towards the wreckage of a star ship that fills the end of the ravine. There is a stream running to our right.

However, after bouncing off the Jedi Outcast due to having fundamental personal conflict with its control mechanism and experiencing bugs I didn’t want to troubleshoot, I massively enjoyed Star Wars Outlaws. It was a wonderful little bit of Star Wars to experience, wander around in, do crimes and have fun with the story. I’ll buy it when it gets a tempting enough discount on Steam.

Wait ! Today’s post concept was supposed to be a bit of a music party 🙂 It’s been a little while since I’ve gone down the Youtube recommendations and let them do impromptu karaoke to the videos (sorry neighbours). One remembering from Steelpanda aka Nikki’s lovely chill Lego building stream (Twitch link) was Floppotron … She’d played a weird synth version of Last Christmas, so I had to check if there’d been a Floppotron version. Answer – yes, here’s a link :-D.

It’s … different.

What’s a Floppotron ? It takes hardware from the Dawn Of IT Time and uses in ways that were never envisioned by the designers. We used to depend on floppy drives of 3.5 inches, 5.25 inches and 8 inches. And then there were the printers … All of them have motors that would make a hell of a racket. And Mr Paweł Zadrożniak gave us the Floppotron. It looks like it’s evolved over the years since the (here’s the Star Wars link!) Floppy Duo playing an absolutely brilliant for what it’s on version of the Imperial March.

They don’t make the hardware like they used to. But my headache is increasing listening to that so time for less grating music.

We're looking at the face is a white furred animal, which I think is a seal. It has a small black nose, their eyes are closed and there are many whiskers. The captions are "Listening to music. Very very nice"

Something I’ve thought absolutely magical since I first saw it was this animated video to Goldfrapp’s sublime cover of It’s Not Over Yet. That song may have started me on listening to Goldfrapp and led to me buying all their albums. And then there’s the animation which is beautiful and heartbreaking.

Next up is going to another animation, this time of Communication by The Cardigans. They said on a collection album that they like to write lyrics that are subtle until they come up and hit you on the head with an axe. And Communication is another very thoughtful, maybe not so much with the axes, song.

Going back to another song on in the background of stream today, I’ve always been a huge fan of the incredible voice that Kate Bush has and she was always massively ahead of her time with the music that she gave us. And it’s still popular with tunes like Running Up That Hill. And she made brilliant albums too that would run the songs in together.

Talking of brilliant albums, there’s always Pink Floyd and Wish You Were Here is always a favourite. Maybe not so much for the middle tracks but oh so definitely for Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the title track, Wish You Were Here which started on the album as someone tuning the radio to find something they liked before starting to play along to what they found on their guitar.

A much more recent discovery for me has been Metric, here they are with IOU. They have a different sound that caught the ear with Gold Guns Girls and a definite catchy energy.

Talking of catchy energy, another fairly recent vibe has been The Veronicas with the sexy energy throbbing through their Untouched, which I’m selecting on the youtubes while chair dancing to Gold Guns Girls.

Back to a couple of favourites from when I was growing up, plus one a little later. All About Eve were a big part of my listening when I was a kid, here’s their breakthrough hit Martha’s Harbour. And one from a bit more recently, Blue Sonic Boy for the Doctor Who fans. I love how she just wanders off into the back of the set for a little while to let the guitar soloists have their moment, with the wander timed just so to have her back in time for more singing.

Picture, sketch. We're looking at a green dwagon wearing a multicoloured tie holding up an implement. He's just emerged from the door of a tall blue box, with panels lower down and windows above. There is a light up top. The caption is "Regeneration gone awry?"

I nearly reposted another thing there but that feels better :-D. I kinda miss sketching, although my head isn’t quite ready to return to that yet.

Next up in this musical mystery tour is something from Chris Rea (I was looking for a bloke singer to post a link to, it’s almost all been ladies so far). It’s not one of his Christmas songs, it’s the bright and happy Loving You Again.

I feel like I need a bit of cute and there’s Lisa Hannigan waiting there to brighten up this particular pub’s evening with I Don’t Know. Must look up to see if there’s anything new from this lady.

Last few ? Here we go. Gotta pick up the iPad soon so I can get that at least one chapter in before bedtime. Talking of books … sometimes they’re awesome in the first draft, sometimes they need a : Rewrite. There’s Sia.

And here I am tempted to go on listening to the great music on the youtubes. Maybe one day I’ll find my way to Mexico ? (Maybe not, bit toasty there). Anyway, that’s a lovely song by The Staves, who do have an album out that I need to get.

Penultimate song for this post – if you’re sad and need a cheering up, one thing is guaranteed to give you some happy feelings, a Kitten Marching Band.

Last one for tonight – I’ll be setting the recording thing tonight so I can Wake Up (wonderful happy track from Sakura Girl) to the cricket that’s on too late for me to watch before going to bed.

Night all, sleep well have a lovely day.

PS The security oopsie was me leaving my bag in a coffee shop after having lunch. Unattended suspicious bag left under a table ? Eeek ! But courtesy of a guy (who I was watching because he was tripping the threat warnings talking to someone on the next table) was watching me a bit too close as I left, I picked up bag before getting too far. Kinda indicative of bad brain times though !

Advent day 12 and the Emperor is on the way

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December 12, 2024

9:19 pm

advent

Hello everyone,

Bit of a bad body and brain day today so I’m going to attempt to pay attention to that and do a quick post … What’s behind the door today ?

Picture. Advent scene again, the model collection grows against the snow scene. Red Dwagon is to the left and the models are scattered. The new one is a dark shuttle with two grey wings extending to the sides. It's on top of a 20 sided dice with two more 10 sided dice in front set to 10 and 2.

There we go. I’m attempting something new today with using numbers on the dice for the days. Does that work ? I’ll keep at it although I’ll need to improvise when the dice run out of numbers.

Today’s new figure is the Emperor’s Shuttle, which has the little central pod with two long wings either side that fold up for landing. The prompt there could be to talk about the evil overlords or modern day who’s in charge. But you know me, I don’t like to bring that in to here. You get enough of that from all of the other sources of media. I’d prefer to be a bit of an island away from all that stuff.

(Wonder how much that sea castle from the other post would be and what it would be like to live there 😀 )

I think it’s updates about me time – I mentioned bad brain bad body day above … I think that’s mostly down to the time of year and it being close to the winter break. I don’t think I saw the sun today (work from home all day plus Big Cloud) and that probably has something to do with how awake I’m feeling. The winter break will be good for getting away from Stuff and generally being able to chill out.

I’m struggling a bit physically, with an ongoing back issue and issues in my hips. I should probably replace my chair again because it’s almost certainly contributing heavily to those issues. Oh and the 3? (could be 2 and a bit) year old chair is already falling apart. I’m also having cramping issues in my legs, which are slowing me down a little bit.

Picture. We're looking at a projection of a lady in a full length robe with a hood. She's looking to the left, holding a mug and the captions are "Help me caffeine, you're my only hope"

Yep. Tired and sore but still mostly functional, so I’ll get by on that. I know a lot of people are worse off than that, hope they can get by on what spoons they have available as well. That’s the thing, we throw everything into things like the day job and don’t have much left for later.

Other stuff ?

I think the day is imminent where I retire the phone … my mobile is with the Three company and it’s over a year out of contract. They’ve just announced an imminent merger with another big company which means … no idea on what’s going to happen with the prices ! So a Cunning Plan could be to upgrade the phone so I get an upgrade for the phone and at the same time, tie in the monthly cost for the length of a new contract.

I’m also heavily considering upgrading Meltdown (desktop PC) a bit early … because this could be a good time to do that. Except I think I’ll do it the economical way and defer getting a new graphics card for a few months. Oh it looks like the ones I’d get are largely out of stock at the moment anyway. I’m looking at going to a 16GB 4060Ti card. The one in stock is £464, the ones on “pre-order” start at £390. Pre-order on a card that’s been released for a while usually means that the website doesn’t know what to do about cards that aren’t in stock.

I think that’s it for now. If you’re struggling, hang in there. Hope you get a good chance to rest and recharge soon. Nite all !

Advent day 11 and we’re shipping

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December 11, 2024

10:37 pm