Month: June 2016

That’s either a lot of pages or not very many …

And of course, everything makes more sense with context.

In a story driven book, it can be a pleasant collection of short stories. I’ve really enjoyed a few of those collections, especially :

Anne McCaffrey’s Get Off The Unicorn;
Heinlein
Larry Niven with the Known Space short stories
And many more too.

It can be the length of a novel with a good story which rattles through its tale and leaves you very satisfied by the end (Man Plus was an excellent 215 pages), or the length of a short story that has been thrashed out far beyond what it should have been (like the various Mass Effect books).

It could be part of a series of books which just keep getting better as the series goes on with the cliffhanger at the end of one book leaving you eager for the next and cursing the wait until you get your mitts on it.

(And then there are the books that start around this mark but then fester, grow and mutate into pretty crummy books. Yep, I’m looking at you Mr Weber with the Honorverse that went on too long).

254 pages is about what you get in computer magazines now, it’s a far cry from the 1000 or so you might have got with your PCW mag or Computer (spit) Shopper where you got a massive doorstop which was excellent for a variety of reasons : many adverts that were worth reading and collapsed the price down. The last time I bought a Computer Shopper (yep, I know, never again), it was 4 times the price and a quarter of the size. And one reason I got it was to find out about computer bits sellers. The ads in these mags are actually useful …

But the reduction in ads in recent times for those mags is probably a sad reflection of the industry, where instead of huge numbers of suppliers, the bad ones have died leaving fewer suppliers to fight for your business. Margins are tough and so is the business. Means we get stuff cheaper though :-).

The 254 pages refers to none of those though – but I am going to tease it out some more … cos I’m like that :-).

Yep. Evil.

And I will be wearing that other t-shirt at some point.

After having a bit of a collapse last week, I’m actually much better this week. I’m not back to as good as I have been lately, not yet. But a lot of the angry red has been reclaimed by Healthy Pasty White. Not fixed yet and I could very easily set it back again by being careless. But it is a good sign that my outsides have been reclaiming the bad again. Gives more hope.

Good signs. Must see if I can keep that improvement going with things like drinking lots of water to balance the hot muggy conditions we have here at the moment.

And no, 254 pages is probably not how long my doctor’s notes are. I have mixed feelings about missing seeing them last week. On one side, I made a promise which I didn’t manage to keep. On the other, I was so heavily affected by the allergy problems that an allergy test would have been a waste of time … again.

Wonder if 254 is anywhere near to the number of orders I’ve put in with That Delivery Place Which Does Not Pay Taxes. I think you know who I mean there. They’re big and the EU branch is based in the tax haven that is Luxembourg. I put in an order for Something Large and the delivery option I chose said to expect it Friday or Saturday when I’d have a chance to be in to accept it.

Imagine my surprise when an email pops up saying that it was arriving today … when I was committed all day at work. Cue an email to the customer service people, who allegedly acted and moved delivery back to Friday. Nah. It still came today as a happy surprise with a knock on the door around 8pm ish.

254 pages ?

That’s how many pages are in the book for the Lego Le Mans car.

It is in its box, silently taunting me. I can hear Vroom Vroom noises in my mind. Yep. And it’s not the neighbour with the deliberately broken exhaust either.

It’s going to be so tough to resist the temptation to put it together ahead of the Le Mans 24 hour race, which is 10 days away.

There ! Such a tease tonight. And I am so completely unrepentant.

And I’ll leave it there before another group of people joins that list of those who are going to hunt me down and murder me in my sleep for deeds done. My current boss will probably do that if we go through with the idea to get him a Metal Earth kit (DEFINITELY!) or a Nanoblock Titanic (cos – reasons) for his leaving gift.

I’ve actually done it !

I’ve given up on one of the model thingies … But not this one :

That’s actually Amazon’s pic because I’m not quite recovered enough to want to pose the model for the camera. Yep. Lazy. But I have improved since Thursday. More later.

The Nanoblock models are usually pretty easy to put together. Just like Lego, they’re based on rectangular blocks with bumps that fit into the block above plus a few other blocks that allow angles to go in. It can be awkward for the two following reasons but they’re not too bad apart from the challenge of fingers on small items.

Difficulty one – colour matching. The colour on the paper isn’t always the same as the colour on the block. This was especially true of the Pirate Ship.

Difficulty two – aligning one layer with the layer above. Actually not too bad when you get used to how the instructions are laid out and the occasional confusing bit of perspective.

So on the whole, the nanoblock kits are really satisfying to put together. And you can find the bits with a torch when you drop them on the floor. Because you know that’s going to happen.

Metal Earth models are a whole different ballgame. Reminder of what one is ? Here we are :

Looks ok doesn’t it ? Actually looks pretty shiny. And all that comes from a couple of laser cut sheets of metal that in theory, snap together into the Shiny Thing. The complication comes from the multiple different angles involved in the model. Instead of it all being right angles like Lego and Nanoblock, the angles are all over the place and the order is also non-intuitive for snapping fixing lugs into holes.

Very tiny, very difficult, even with the freebie long thin nose pliers acquired for the purpose (for free happily as I wouldn’t recommend them – the spring is the type that breaks frequently).

I’ve actually given up on my Metal Earth XWing, as it wasn’t going together particularly well. Lots of frustration and I think the metal was close to fatigue cracking … That’s another thing about metal models that involve bending, they’ll fatigue and crack eventually especially if you take multiple goes (like on these) to get them together.

I still have an AT-AT walker and the Normandy from Mass Effect to put together … soon. Not today though.

One thing that you may have guessed is … I wrote on Friday that I was having a particularly bad period where I just wasn’t interested in doing anything. Thursday was particularly fuzzy minded. But … As is normal for me, since acknowledging that I’ve managed to turn around the downward cycle and have actually improved a bit.

I’m not fixed totally (more in a bit) but a few tortured bits have almost recovered back to normality again. Is it warmer today ? I’ve been warm enough to take the jumper off instead of freezing under the fleece. My legs have improved nicely. They’re not fixed but almost there.

Arms are still ripped to shreds but they’re better than they were too. I need to invest in some tubigrip stuff to put on at night to protect them from my own worst enemy in this, me. Mittens have been suggested but I don’t think they’d work. I don’t think I’d keep them on.

My energy levels have improved a bit and should be up to going back to work tomorrow. I suspect that brisk walk to the bus and into work will wake them up. Knees are still battered but that’s another of those historical injuries.

But those pain levels receded to the point where I built the R2D2 yesterday and attempted to put the XWing together today.

Close out summary ?

Still wrecked. That hasn’t changed much. But a bad downward cycle has reversed and I’ve been improving again.
Metal Earth models are nasty.
Lego and Nanoblock are awesome. And the Lego Le Mans car is on its way to give me something to put together while the 24 hour race is on.
Been light on gaming over the past few days – haven’t wanted to attack that last Planetbase planet and Elite is definitely an In The Mood game.

One thing I’d like you to try and take away from this is – if you think you are on a downward spiral, stop. Think. What is happening ? How can you address it ?

For me, some of that is looking at what I do and asking myself – “Do healthy people do this ?” And in the case of me attacking my outsides, healthy people definitely don’t do that.

There’s a bit more to it than that. I’ve been drinking much more water over the past few days and I’ve been treating my outsides with some more Fucibet healing gunky cream. It’s good stuff that is and is the one healing gunky cream that’s worked over a long period for me.

Work should be fun tomorrow. Wonder how many emails I have waiting for me ?

And when is my foot going to find the XWing pilot that I dropped earlier and can’t find …

Crikey.

Holiday time is supposed to be when you rest, recover and recuperate. But this one seems to be having the opposite effect ! I can’t really remember too much of what I was doing yesterday. Perhaps it’s an ill ? Maybe. I think it’s actually the effects of me attacking myself a bit too much lately.

I don’t get that. I don’t think I’ve had anything of what was causing me to have bad reactions. Perhaps it’s actually something related to work. As in, the teacake and lunch may have been giving me the Stuff I needed to keep going.

The attacking of self is a major factor though. I really do have to figure out how I can stop that because I won’t get properly better until I can leave my outsides alone enough to allow them to fix. It’s actually my insides as well, although that can be chalked up to dehydration. I think I’m drinking enough (lots of water) but what I do drink is probably getting soaked up by repairs to my outsides, leaving not enough to keep the muscles happy.

I’m cold as well ! Unfeasably cold ! I suspect my metabolism has slowed due to not doing very much. Sometimes it does feel as if I should be wrapped up and trapped in a blanket like Kitty up top, until I heal.

I am healing though, the various damage I have will typically heal in 3 days or so, if allowed. I just keep redamaging it. It’s really frustrating to know that you might be that close to healing for good, except for your own efforts.

Enough about me though. What have I been up to this week ?

I did tell someone I was going to see the doctors again. That didn’t happen. Grr. Yesterday was a cloudy blur (plus I was waiting on a delivery that didn’t arrive until 4.30 ish – pictures of what that was when I put them together). Tuesday was also waiting for a delivery (more later!). Wednesday was lazy and today, I was too late. Appointments go very quickly at my local docs and you can only get them on the day. Monday was a chill out day part recovering from the long Comic Con day (so worth it) and part getting my old TV cleared off ready for :

Tivo arrived on Tuesday.

I have never met a piece of electronics that is so keen to do its job. It’s a cable TV box with a bunch of tuners so it can record multiple things and some intelligence built in to let it suggest recordings. The suggestions are a curious feature but may well get disabled due to annoyance.

One feature I like is that I can control it from my iPad via home networking (I have had to recommission my Powerline bits n bobs to make this happen). You know how clunky a TV remote interface can be ? Perhaps still clunky but a touchscreen can make it a bit smoother to do stuff. It’s definitely easier to delete all of the suggestions.

I watch my stuff in order. I won’t dip in randomly midway through a series, I’ll watch the story unfold over the course of a programme’s entire run. I’ll series link stuff that I want to watch.

What I don’t expect is for the suggestion to override what I’m watching. I don’t think the Tivo box likes the cricket as it has tried to change the channel away from it a few times. It needs more training and possibly that Suggestions feature being disabled.

Wednesday also saw me heading into Planetbase again to get the rush colony achievement. I have plans now for how to win at that game, the certain order of what to build in order to get things going quickly and keep them going quickly.

That’s curious, the Steam overlay thingy for the achievement isn’t on the screenie. The conditions needed were 100 colonists inside 30 days and …

250 colonists in 60 days for the other rush colony achievement. Sorted ! I only have the achievements from the Storm planet (lightning, limited solar, limited wind, limited build area) to come and then all done until they add some new challenge features.

I also found time to fly the Internet Spaceships again in Elite. It’s just had a patch which has changed a few things. One of those is the charity donation mission things to buy navy rank to let you have bigger and better faction only ships. They’ve changed all that, instead of it being 10k ish cr to buy about 1% guaranteed, it’s more like 250k to 1m credits. I’m being more economical there and only contributing when it’s value for money. (Context – typical profit per tonne is 500cr but I have been seeing 3000-4000cr per tonne occasionally).

They’ve also expanded the equipment and customisation considerably … Which has caused much angst. Beta testing is supposed to catch problems before they occur but I’ve been seeing videos of one shot kills on pretty potent, tough ships. There is also talk of the Plasma Cannon (big ball of slow moving, slowly reloading fire) working like a heavily overpowered machine gun.

Things have gone imbalanced, to the point where I’m just running from fights at the moment instead of sticking around. It doesn’t help there that my second Cutter (yep!) doesn’t have its full armament yet or full defenses yet. Need more in game cash. It doesn’t help that the ships that have been after me have been the big Anacondas.

Big Elite Ships :

Federal Corvette – best ship for combat. Not so good for anything else.
Imperial Cutter – best ship for trading, should have some combat potential. Fast enough to easily outrun pirates.
Anaconda – best allrounder, pretty good for combat, trading and exploration.
Type 9 Space Turd Freighter – best ship for trading that you can acquire without doing the grind to get the Cutter.

I said “second” didn’t I … IMV Min Max died to a smaller ship as I tried to go toe to toe with a pirate. Usually I can run away before the critical point but … oh well. Not this time. Oops ! Enter Cookie Morning :

Yep. I went for the black pain job as mourning for the first Cutter. I did have a happy surprise though today when the 12m cost for the insurance was reimbursed due to the craziness of the non player character ships.

Only 376m away from properly fitting it out. Could take a while. But I have been enjoying the game and it is a fairly relaxed playstyle which suits my current level of energy.

Shinies ?

There’s a preview. These are supposed to be really tough to build so I didn’t really want to start while I’m having lots of pain. Perhaps the Nanoblock R2D2 first :-).