Month: September 2019

Hello everyone,

Things still seem to be continuing to rocket by at the moment. Time seems to be moving fast ! But before I get on to the inevitable pretty screenshot spam …

Too late !

That one was illuminated by the light of a Neutron Star, shortly before :

Diving into the streamers to get a hyperdrive jump boost.

Back to the real world ? I should have a couple of days off this week ! Yey ! This is mostly due to getting close to busting the flexi time working hours credit limit though, with more of those long hours to come later. I don’t mind that, because those super long days are due to getting out of the office and seeing Stuff. Stuff that I can’t talk about here because of you know, it’s work 😀 And I try to keep the work stuff out of this blog.

Oh – click for bigger on the pictures as per usual. Apparently they aren’t in the full 1440p source resolution but I hope they still look amazing.

Plan for the two days off involves chilling out (of course) and … hopefully a trip into Wales again. I want to look at a castle, plus there’s Cardiff and the book caves and the sweet shop and the occasional music store and … (hushed voice) …. Lego shop. Yep.

Other game, big ship. I think it’s from either X Wing, or it’s an Imperial Assault Gunboat from Tie Fighter. Big ship now in Lego. I’m not fussed about the other new Lego stuff that’s coming, it’s either Meh or seen it before. But I do want that big one, if I can find a place to put it.

 Might melt in the sun though.

I’m almost getting to the end of the music library with what I’ve managed to listen to as well. Not long left, only about 350 tracks. That’s taken over a year ! It’s good to listen to it all again. I have a few things in mind actually for content to come :

Something about soundtracks. Some films are memorable for their story, some films are more memorable for the soundtrack. The best films match an incredible story and great soundtrack. I want to talk about those someday soon. This thought brought to you by listening to soundtracks from :

John Williams – incredible soundtracks for Star Wars, Raiders, Jurassic Park, ET, Jaws … and so many more. The magic of this one is that, while you can recognise the style of the composer, the soundtracks are different and fit the film.
James Horner – wrote the memorable soundtrack of Wrath of Khan as well as Battle Beyond the Stars.
And a few more (Stu Phillips, Barry Gray, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Bear McCreary) but that would be spoilers for the talking about movies post !

I’m wanting to do a few more Elite videos as well. The subjects in mind are :
Neutron Star Boosting
Exploration and the new Discovery Scanner system.
Both of these should do for some short and hopefully sweet videos with pretty stuff on screen. And apparently it’s stuff people want to see.

Like nebula ! And a paint job apparently getting a bit tatty.

That looked amazing while jumping towards it. This was the Bubble Nebula. Quite little actually.

I think it looked better from the outside to be honest !

I caught this shot after jumping away one spot as well. A local star, with the bubble nebula behind.

This was the next nebula, Altera’s Eye. There’s actually a black hole in there. I thought there’d be a chance to land and take a nice screenie with black hole distortion but that wasn’t to be. Next time ! To be honest, I was feeling a little burned out on the exploration run and wanting to complete the route before the time limit expired. The other routes that I have in mind have more generous times.

The second last stop was in the Gorgon Nebula. This was another one where the region of space appeared first as a small feature on the galactic ribbon, with those brighter stars all spread out there in a distinctive cluster. And then you get closer and the feature steadily resolves. This was the last jump before the destination :

The Gorgon Nebula research facility. Another asteroid base, in the rings of a gas giant. A good stopover before the last stop :

A station so posh looking on the inside, I thought I had to get the paint job sorted out before taking the screenshot.

It’s a curious layout actually … That’s the docking bay on the inside of a rotating section. It’s a bulbous cylinder pattern on the outside split up into distinct sides on the inside, with the docking landing pads taking up the whole of one of those sides. The centripetal gravity goes towards the floor, or rather it goes directly outwards. So where the sides join, gravity is not straight down.

That must blow the mind if you were to actually try and walk around in there. I suspect space legs would soon acclimatise to the irregular spin gravity though. The hab sections of the stations tend to be more like :

That’s an old one, showing the docking bay in the centre and a habitation ring surrounding it. The farther out you go, the faster the linear velocity and the higher the spin gravity. So the hab ring will be at higher gravity than the cargo and docking area. (This is a good thing for healthiness). That’s Pratchett’s Disc and the screenshot is from my first Elite pilot … That long ago !

It’s good that stuff like this is in the game. It looks great and there’s a nod to science and a proper physics way of doing things without cheating too much.

Because I do like my internet spaceships to not cheat too much :-). It’s also good that they’ve added in various tribute locations, like Pratchett’s Disc, as well. It’s a lovely gesture.

Hello everyone,

Been back in the pilot’s seat again. Out in the stars, finding the lovely looking places.

And of course, landing by them and taking the screenshots (click for bigger as always). Before diving too deeply into those internet spaceships :

Work stuff – I don’t talk about work stuff much here because … work. There were a couple of away trips last week that were instructive plus a couple more away trips this week which we’ll hopefully learn more from. And more to come ! Busy.

Outsides – I’m going to talk about these in more detail at some point. After perhaps 8 years of the long term condition, I’m actually almost better now. It’s very, very close. It must have been a case where the damage increased so quickly and dramatically that my immune system just couldn’t keep up and it took a while to stabilise the condition and get it under control before repairs could happen. Almost there now though.

Feeling old on the inside now though.

Film stuff – Ad Astra is worth a watch. It’s a new film starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who has to appeal to his astronaut dad to resurface from being holed up at the other end of the solar system. It’s been described as a mix between 2001 and Apocalypse Now. I need to watch Apocalypse Now again at some point to see if that’s a fair comparison but it feels about right. There are stunning visuals here, great action sequences and in between those, what felt like a fair bit of psychological nuance going on. It feels like the mix is a fair comment.

Worth watching. Leave your expectations at the door as usual, ignore the dodgy science (gravity simulation in films is tough) and see what it’s got. As mentioned, there are a few bits of dodgy science in there but nothing on the scale of Interstellar’s dodginess and I rate this and Interstellar pretty high on Intriguing Film, Worth Watching.

Talking of science, I know more about this one now. The crater to the right has a distinctive pimple in the middle. I’ve learned that this is a telltale for a particularly heavy impact, the type that makes craters a few kilometers wide.

Did I mention that the rover has a name now ? Searching For Biscuits is the mothership, the Crumb is the rover.

Found a Jellyfish Nebula on the way …

And a Crab Nebula too, with the ribbon of the Milky Way running down its centre.

And more opportunities to take beauty shots of Biscuit and Crumb.

This is a nebula in the NGC 1491 region.

Before heading off to an encounter with a ghost ship, the Zurara. One thing I look for in games is how things are put together. So here, we have a space ship with a couple of partial spinning habitation rings. There is a command section up at the bow :

And an engineering section aft, with a pair of gargantuan engines coupled to it. One thought about those engines, there’d be massive torsional stress going through the pylons as the engines fire up and go forward with the pylons transmitting that thrust to the central body. The engines want to move, Newton’s Laws say that the centre section doesn’t want to. The pylons are what connect them up and transfer the force.

There we go. I do like my internet spaceships to make a certain amount of sense and it’s great how much of stuff like that has been hidden in the game.

I attempted a landing on the engineering section but didn’t get in. No keepsie salvage this time.

On to the next way point and this planetoid was close enough to that sun that the fuel scoop was happily collecting more hydrogen.

I never want to get too close to these, the distortion in the Galactic Ribbon is the lensing effect of a black hole.

I think I’m learning the trick of getting close to these though. That’s a Neutron Star at the centre, a star that’s gone boom in a nova but isn’t quite massive enough to collapse completely into a black hole. They’re also known as Pulsars, as the streamers you see there give off EM Radiation (X Ray radio waves) that our telescopes can pick up and we see them on Earth as pulses of signal as the neutron stars rotate. In game, if you fly into the streamer, you get bounced around a bit (dangerous) but you can jump 4x the distance you can normally. Handy for going long distance in less time.

You do miss the sights though, like this moon that is so close to the gas giant’s rings that it’s almost touching them. I had the happy sight of seeing this one in daylight today after landing there in darkness yesterday.

On to the last location, ominously named “Explorer’s End”. Ominous.

That’s the sight as you drop out of hyperspace. The orange star is a super young Herbig AE/BE star. (More on Wiki). The star is 0.777 times the radius of our sun. Not big. The white one is another matter, it’s a Class O giant star, 158 times the radius of our sun. Chunky.

Those are the same two stars, after backing away a bit. But that’s not all for this system. There are also a couple of black holes. One was only 2.5 Light Seconds away when dropping out of hyperspace, the other was safely ages away. (2.5 Light Seconds is about twice the orbit distance of the Moon). The issue with this system is that you can drop out between the two stars, instead of to the side like I did there. Or … you can drop out too close to the Black Hole. That’s always a bit bad.

I’m actually finding Elite to be a little grindy at the moment though. It’s like my mind wants to be playing other games (it does) and is resenting being on a bit of a timescale for the current exploration run. Not too far to go though before civilisation.

 That’s the Jellyfish Nebula again and the faint lights of another asteroid base.

It is a very pretty game though.

So I left yesterday’s post with a picture of the Searching For Biscuits, landed at a space port …

I had a chance to do a little more flying around yesterday, following a new expedition route.

This route has nebulae … lots of them. I’m hoping to find some amazing screenshots from this route. As always, click for bigger. Most of these are in 1440p from the game, although there’s a reduced hi-res one later.

About that one though, I’d been looking for a Voyager Surfs The Rings shot for a little while now. If you’ve watched Star Trek Voyager, you’ll know the shot I mean, it’s from the intro sequence. A rather fine intro sequence too, although flying through the rings like that is kinda vandalism. You can’t do the astronomic vandalism in Elite but you can acquire some very pretty screenshots. In this case, there’s an asteroid base tucked inside one of those inner rings. More later.

I did 3 stop offs on the route yesterday and found things more mysterious than nebulae …

What is this ? A crashed ship ? Looks like a Cobra Mk3, the ship of the first game. Investigating further, you find various logs from the pilot. Who could it be ?

It’s a little faint but the word Jameson emerges from the dark … (That’s the default name from the ancient BBC B game and there’s a fair bit of game lore built up around him).

Turns out there is various skullduggery going on. The story goes that our Commander Jameson was dispatched on a mission to protect human space by planting a virus that disables the hyperdrives of the Thargoids, preventing them from using faster than light travels. Except …. the virus doesn’t just target the equipment, it targets the life forms too. Skullduggery indeed. Our nameless, faceless skullduggers go even further, by planting a bomb on Commander Jameson’s Cobra Mk3, disabling all power systems and stranding him on this desolate, airless planet.

It’s great when lore like this finds its way into the game. You get the impression that there is an absolute tonne of stuff to find.

Also bases, carved out of rocks in the rings surrounding the gas giant, with a great view overlooking the Hind Nebula. I found another mystery out there too :

A quiet, dead looking ship going by the name of Alcatraz. A prison ship apparently … and crippled by an attack by unknown forces.

You may spy the words “Cell Block” around there. I wasn’t going to get too close. But. What’s this ! The computer announces “Frame Shift Surge Detected” and out pops a new object.

It’s small compared to Alcatraz megaship but you may be able to pick it out on the right hand side, just below the far end of the megaship. There was a scary moment as it pops out into real space, as the surge makes the ship computer drop offline. Totally immobile, drifting, powerless, lightless. A definite enigma, with capabilities we don’t fully understand.

A closer look at this mysterious octagonal object that seems to fly around through pure anger at the presence of humanity in this system. Perhaps it still remembered the anger at what Commander Jameson’s mysterious masters attempted to do to its Thargoid ancestors. It allowed me to close and follow and while missiles from the megaship were bouncing off it, it allowed me to follow along without incident.

Time to move on though.

I’ve actually been to this station before. It’s the Witch Head Nebula science station, in the rings of another gas giant. A quite beautiful sight with a very white looking gas giant and very bright rings. One thing I missed with the trading and combat interludes was how pretty this game can be when you’re getting out and about.

On to the next destination and we see the Orion Nebula, albeit somewhat occluded by the rings of another gas giant.

And another view, this time of the other side of the nebula emerging from above the ring.

That was it for Sunday’s investigations. Maybe more tomorrow. We shall see !

Last post for today … sometimes the screenshots don’t go quite as planned :

This was an attempt at a high res special screenshot of the Searching For Biscuits closing in on the central node of the Alcatraz in order to scan for communications logs. The high res screenshots work by rapidly capturing many images to build up a higher resolution whole. For my set up, the standard 1440p screenshots become 5760p, or 16 times the pixels. (4×4). Except sometimes it doesn’t quite work … I suspect being inside the gas cloud messed up the lighting and you should be able to see the resulting patchiness.

Still, it was a good interlude, hanging around while the Thargoid Medusa Interceptor had a good look around the megaship. And a fun session too.

I saw a tweet earlier that sparked a thought or two …

It was from Think Defence and it was asking “Any suggestions on the best names for the new RN mini frigates ?”

Not that one. That’s a curious looking ship though, wonder if it’s still available ?

There it is. New ship design, just announced. It’s the Type 31e, following the Arrowhead 140 design which is based on the Dutch Iver Huitfeld design. So a similar shape and insides and then we’ll tailor it to the equipment and systems of working that we want to put in it.

Looks tidy. But there’s a difference to “it looks nice” and it being able to go anywhere, kick butt and get out again. We’ll see what this one turns out like !

This post isn’t one to be about naval ship design though. This one is for the names !

The last ship of mine that I posted on here was the Black Sheep :

Seen there investigating the treasure trove of Dav’s Hope. The next one was “Strength of Atlas”, a Type 9 freighter put together for taking lots of cargo to a trading community goal.

She’ll be back out carrying more cargo for future community goal missions. The freighters aren’t much fun to fly though. They don’t turn, they orbit.

Effective for what they do though and they don’t need to be unlocked like the Imperial Cutter or Federal Corvette. The next ship was for combat :

An Alliance Crusader, going by the name of Goldie Runner. I’m using dog names as the theme for the Alliance ship names, so the first one was “sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD”. Yep. Forgot about caps lock and by then, the name was baked in and it’s bad luck to change it. Goldie was an athlete who loved to run fast… and I’ll think of something suitable for the Ben-ship at some point. The current ship is :

Searching for Biscuits. She’s an Orca class passenger ship (no passengers allowed) who will be going on a couple of short range exploration expeditions and I’m hoping to acquire some amazing looking screenshots.

But how about these new Navy ships ? The various ship classes have their names arranged by themes so :

At the moment, Duke class frigates with names like Richmond, Northumberland, St Albans.
Minehunters named after seaside towns like Grimsby, Penzance.
Destroyers with names starting with D like Daring, Dragon (like that one), Diamond.
River class patrol vessels like Mersey and Tyne.
City class Type 26 ships coming with names like Glasgow and London.

One of the reasons for the new City class names was to try and encourage recruitment by connecting the ship to a place to recruit from. Something like : “I’m a Glaswegian serving on HMS Glasgow and my pop helped build the ship.” That’s powerful.

But …. where to go for the next ships ? You could go a bit boring and safe and traditional with something like towns. As in, smaller population areas to go along with the cities. There are 5 of these planned so 5 names for each category.
Let’s see : Warwick, Chichester, Salisbury, Ramsgate, Bodmin. Safe, boring.
Battles : Britain, Normandy, Arnhem, Dunkirk, Tobruk.
Football clubs and stadia : Anfield, Stamford Bridge, Highbury, Old Trafford, Ashton Gate.

Pop culture is also incredibly powerful in the youth that the Navy want to recruit from. So let’s see …

Sci fi can be a goldmine of names. Enterprise is already taken (she’s a survey ship), so Defiant from Deep Space 9, (Millennium) Falcon from Star Wars, Rocinante from The Expanse, Prometheus from Stargate and Galactica (or Pegasus) from the Battlestar show. Pegasus is a great name for a ship.

And then there’s : Thundercat, Thunderbird, Dogtanian, Fireball, Stingray, Greyskull.

Not sure about those. And Emmerdale, Walford, Erinsborough, Benwell, Holby City.
Kent (got one already), Wayne, Oliver, Stark, Rogers, Xavier. (6 because Kent is taken already)

Some names are definitely better than others. AND WE HAVEN’T GOTTEN INTO GAME CULTURE YET !

From Warcraft : Proudmoore, Windrunner, Arthas, Thrall, Stormwind.
Halo : Spartan, Cortana, Keyes, Locke, Arbiter.
Not done with pop culture yet either : Anakin, Amidala, Ahsoka, Ackbar, Andor. (The A-class is already taken by submarines though).
There’s more : Tracer, Bastion, Hanzo (ship namers wouldn’t know the consequences), McCree, Winston.
Also : Wick, Breakpoint, Jaeger, Fyra, Revolt.

Addon – couple more :
Stokes, Archer, Cook, Atherton, Botham.
Lineker (perhaps no),  Beckham, Butcher, Pearce … and that’s all I got for footballers.
Wilkinson (would become the Sword), Warburton, Hastings, Johnson, O’Driscoll.

So many names. I’m probably disqualified from naming any ship though, after my current form. (Elite Fleet list is at the link). In my current save, I’ve gone through :
Starters : Money Spider, Undaunted, Dragonbug, Greater Dragonbug, Mini Magpew, Keela’s Wings, Dauntless and Mighty Magpew.
Explorer ships : Day Tripper, Searching For Tea, Chrissa’s New Potato and Searching for Biscuits.
Scavenger ships : Porpoise Prospector, sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD.
Fighty ships : Mostly Toothless, Commander Fuzzy, Captain of Elysium, Goldie Runner.
Tribute ships : Niki and Charlie, Kerr Avon Forever, Rage of Kashyyyk
Trading ships : Needs More Pewpew, Empire’s Bounty, Tortoise Beats Hare, Black Sheep and Strength of Atlas.

Naming things is fun.

May need a “Searching for Lego”.

This is going to be perhaps a bit of an indulgent post …

Last Test Match of the summer tomorrow ! Almost the last cricket … there’s this 5 day game at The Oval and then there’s T20 Finals day at Edgbaston, Birmingham the weekend after. Not sure where England are touring this year. (New Zealand and South Africa).

I have the Sky Sports cricket channel on at the moment, mostly because having the news channels on in the background gets too depressing. It’s muted though, music beats the sound of old cricket matches. I currently have a Kings of Leon track on and soon it’ll be the Sirius album by Clannad. (Fuzzy is also being happily addicted to a new game, GreedFall, on the laptop).

Anyway. The daft thought was …. what’s the best England side out of players that I’ve seen ? Let’s go.

These kinds of posts always have to have a restriction and this time it’s : This must be a player where I’ve watched a match they played in (on telly is ok), which puts the time region from around the mid 1980s.

Opening up the innings we have : Mike Atherton and Alastair Cook. You need resilience from the opening batsmen and that’s precisely what this pair are. The openers lay the foundation for the rest of the batting to pile on the runs. Atherton earned his nickname of “Iron Mike” and I think the Chef could have scored the most runs of anyone in Test cricket but there’s always a time that you have to call it a day. In Atherton’s case, he had a degenerative condition with his back, which forced him to stop. Cook had just had enough of it.

I missed a lot of Mike Atherton’s career though due to a) playing on the weekends … b) Sky taking the games off terrestrial and c) BBC having very little respect for the sport by showing pretty much anything instead of it. Of all the players, I wanted to bat like Atherton. (and bowl like Devon Malcolm but I was never as tall or quick !)

Number 3 needs a mix of that opening bat resilience and potential to turn that into attack. There’s always the chance that one or both of the openers just gets a really good ball so your No 3 needs to be able to stick around. Ricky Ponting did this expertly for a long time for Australia and did it exceptionally. But this isn’t about the Aussies. My number 3 would be Joe Root. Although don’t let him captain the side. He’s a bit off his game at the moment but when he’s on it, he’s exceptional.

Skipping ahead a little to number 7 and the wicket keeper … Apart from one I’ll come to in a minute, I have a pretty low opinion of pretty much all the England wicket keepers I’ve seen. Ben Foakes was excellent with the gloves but got found out with the bat. Prior was a nutter and his glovework could be very dodgy. Geraint Jones – no. Bairstow is an idiot who has poor glovework and has actually introduced flaws into his batting, he’s a worse player than before he started tinkering.

So who is the keeper ?

Sarah Taylor. She is an absolute legend. Her glovework has always been magical. You expect a wicket keeper to stop everything that gets past the batsman and get the occasional stumping and all of the catches. Taylor does that …. and then produces stumpings and catches that no one has a right to pull off. It’s amazing. And when she’s happy and on it, there’s an effervescent bubbly fun erupting from under the helmet that must be so infectious for the rest of the team. It’s better as a cricket team when you’re having fun, it means you’re doing well. Or it can lift the team into doing better. I used to be really noisy on the field, except when I went into injury survival mode or if I got put on the boundary where I’d get bored.

Sarah Taylor suffers from a quite crippling depression though, focused around perfectionism. I think she described it as “I got to number 1. I can only get worse from there.” That’s really, really tough to deal with as a player. I didn’t hit it like that but I had something different hit me with my bowling. When I could no longer bowl but saw really poor bowlers on my team, I would have very guilty thoughts of “I should be bowling, I am massively better than that and not bowling is making us lose the game.” I hated losing.

This is an amazing player. Even without the inspiration crazy amazing stuff she’ll pull off, she’s easily the best wicket keeper that I’ve ever seen. Saw Jack Russell too. She’s better. Bats really well too when on her game, classic form and crafty innovation.

1 – Mike Atherton, 2 – Alastair Cook, 3 – Joe Root, 7 – Sarah Taylor
(or Alec Stewart if I have to pick a bloke. Great keeper, a titan with the bat. I have huge respect for the attitude he had whenever I saw him play. He’s someone who you would instinctively rely on.)

My all rounder is Ben Stokes at number 6. He could get into any side as either batsman or bowler and regularly produces match winning performances in either role. A super dependable player, another one who hates not giving what he thinks he’s worth to the side. I rate him far ahead of Andrew Flintoff, who occasionally displayed his potential with the bat. Great bowler though. I only saw the last days of Ian Botham and he was struggling massively with back problems.

The spin bowler is Graeme Swann at 8. Another one with a winning attitude and that kind of attitude will carry along a cricket team. The kind of attitude that refuses to admit defeat until the scorebook says you lost. Anyway, Swann had a special technique where he bowled with overspin, which means the ball doesn’t just turn in to the right hander, it also hurries on a bit. Excellent for unsettling them and rushing the batsman into a mistake.

Opening bowlers have to include James Anderson. He’s England’s best bowler out of total merit, knowledge and craftiness. And you know what, Ian Botham, included as a bowler, also for skill and craftiness. When my action was having trouble as a result of basically forgetting my calibrations, watching Botham figure his action out helped me realign what I was doing and also to figure out new tricks.

I’m trying to think of an ultra fast assault with a deadly weapon fast bowler but I think Jofra Archer is the first 95+mph bowler I’ve seen for England. These guys make things happen when conditions are totally against the bowlers.

3rd seamer is Darren Gough. Not the tallest … but one of the most cunning. I suspect that with all of the new innovation that’s come into the game in the last 10 years, he’d have been even better now than when he played. That’s something important, the game has moved on since the days of Atherton and Botham. However, if you got talent, talent tells.

Who are the other batsmen ?

For those not in the list, there’s :

Kevin Pietersen. Never played for England, always played for himself. The best batsman this century before Steve Smith emerged but … fatal for pretty much any team he played for.
Devon Malcolm. A god among fast bowlers … but also erratic and often not really on the same planet.
Jofra Archer. Mentioned above but a bit too new. There is massive promise here though. I’ve only really had “This guy could be awesome” feelings about bowlers like James Anderson and Dale Steyn when they started … but Archer provokes that instinct too.
Steve Harmison. Bowled from a great height but without much accuracy or intelligence. I watched an incredibly frustrating session in the West Indies where England should have won but the batsmen could just leave 90% of everything being bowled. That’s not how you win games.
James Taylor in the batting. A very promising player when he came into the side (to be unforgivably written off by his hero KP) but was lost to the game due to a potentially fatal heart condition. Good to see that he got through that one.
Gooch and Gower – didn’t see them play, slightly before my time.
Nasser Hussain. Always gave everything for England but … other players are better !
Andrew Strauss. A very vulnerable opening batsman and his handling of KP was disastrous.

The others in the middle order would be Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart, plus Paul Collingwood if I’m not allowed to have Sarah Taylor in the side. Vaughan had a style in his batting that just made it look so easy. The best players look as if they have so much more time than everyone else and Vaughan had more time than anyone. I’ve mentioned Alec Stewart above, he’s an absolute titan. Incredibly dependable, with an over my dead body attitude to whether he’d allow the opposition to get the upper hand.

Paul Collingwood got the nickname “Brigadier Block”, partly I think because he may have been starting to struggle physically with the batting. Also because he could defend incredibly if necessary. But that’s not his true strength in any side, he was on another level when in the field. Acrobatic and inspirational. You need players like that to pick off catches, to stop runs they have no excuse being anywhere near, to lift the side.

Cricket can be a really tough, grindy game and it can take an inspirational special moment to lift the side, wake them up and get them performing again. Sometimes it’s a quiet word to the bowler to reset their minds to On again. (Done that a couple of times!). Sometimes it’s a bit of Paul Collingwood magic in the field (Done that too, loved it). Or it can be an effervescent bubbly wicket keeper being involved, being daft, lifting the side through personality and pulling out something magical that’ll be on highlight reels for decades to come.

What’s the line up ? Here we are :

1 – Alastair Cook
2 – Michael Atherton (also captaining)
3 – Michael Vaughan
4 – Joe Root
5 – Alec Stewart
6 – Ben Stokes
7 – Ian Botham
8 – Sarah Taylor keeping wicket (or Paul Collingwood if I’m not allowed the legend)
9 – Graeme Swann
10 – Darren Gough (or Jofra Archer if he fulfils his potential)
11 – James Anderson

I think that side would be more than a match for any team.

This is hugely a matter of personal opinion though ! Every cricket fan reading this will have a different 11. Some will pick Jack Russell. Some will go back in time to Gower, Edrich, Gooch, Randall, Willis, Phil de Freitas and Gladstone Small. Phil Tufnell was a great bowler too. Didn’t see him play much. John Emburey ?

So many amazing players. Only enough room for 11 of them !

I’ve been keeping up with the techie stories more than usual lately.

Maybe I should have been doing that before making the leap and buying the bits but … there you go. It has been good to get a certain amount of confirmation bias coming in from what I’ve been reading though.

Before I go any further – disclosure note. I buy and fund all my own computer kit. I can’t recall being given anything computer related outside of a USB memory stick that was acquired and then wiped without looking at what’s on it. I think it’s still around somewhere. (Be very wary of geeks bearing free USB memory stick gifts)

Oh the thing about techie stories may have something to do with a new internet gateway being put in at work and me no longer being able to indulge in Rockpapershotgun reading at lunchtime. Mind you, that site has gone downhill a massive amount in the last month or so anyway. Tomshardware has replaced it for the lunchtime stuff.

One thing there though. Always be aware of the likely bias in what you’re reading. Make your own mind up as to what you want to believe. Statistics help there … but statistics can be twisted to suit the ends of the person presenting them.

In my case, the Asrock motherboard that I bought is apparently not as good as the Asus or Gigabyte competitors. The raw performance is nigh on identical, to within 1-2% but the power consumption figures were higher. I suspect out of date firmware or rogue settings were to blame there … but those results are still being presented. I acquired the Asrock board because, despite a blip with the sound hardware, it was very solid for the 8 years I had Pumpkin.

There’s a lot of partisanship amongst computer techies. I try to keep a clear head amongst all that, while keeping up my own prejudices brought on by experience with the kit.

But for every “I don’t use Corsair kit because it’s let me down a few times” (it has, I’ve had a couple of memory sticks be dead on arrival), there will be a small army come out of the woodwork and say they’ve never had a problem. I use Corsair power supplies and will continue to do so because, while their memory was dodgy, the power supplies are top notch. A good power supply will still go BANG. Quietly. A poor power supply will go BANG and take half of your computer with it.

A Corsair power supply went bang and was replaced in Pumpkin, no other issues. A Seasonic (I think) power supply went bang in one of my other machines and damaged a couple of other components as it went.

So yeah, remember prejudices. Act on them if you must … but update them often because stuff relevant to a manufacturer’s gear one year becomes completely irrelevant with the next round of gear.

But also look at other people’s prejudices too. Are they advising you to go in one particular direction because they’re blinkered towards the alternatives ? Or is that kit genuinely better. The statistics will tell you. There’s usually a middle ground where the statistics tell you what you need to know.

And then there are the ghosts in the machine.

The latest article to spark off the Deep Thoughts is one on the processor I bought for Meltdown and Intel scaremongering about how it might have a short life … Let’s look at that :

AMD and Intel are rival processor manufacturers. After years of little progress from Intel, AMD have come out with something that blows away the Intel rival. The market share is going up. It’s taking over. So Intel react by sowing doubt and uncertainty. It’s an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 by the way.

To be honest, the AMD chip has a lot to live up to. The i5-2500k Sandy Bridge processor in Pumpkin lasted trouble free for 8 years. However, I know one streamer I don’t watch any more had a Haswell iSomething-4000ish chip die after probably half that. I’m hoping for similar life out of the AMD chip. (To Pumpkin, not the failed Haswell chip).

The speed advantage is real too. There’s 3x the processing power available in the AMD chip compared to the i5-2500k in Pumpkin. That’s more than what I need (I’ll come back to this point in a bit). I haven’t done a comparative test on my laptop yet but its chip had a 50% advantage over Pumpkin. (Clock for clock, it’s actually 2x instead of 1.5x but it’s downrated for laptop battery life).

What I want is for a similar amount of life to what Pumpkin had.

HOWEVER ! I don’t think it would have managed even a year with the settings it had when first activated.

There’s been a few Tomshardware articles (I’m not linking it, they shove notifications at you if you let them, that’s Bad) that talk about the Boost clock performance of the chip and they cast doubt as to how likely it is for the chip to reach that boost performance.

This is irrelevant to most normal users of a computer.

Oi ! Who’s picking these pictures ! Erm.

Ok. Boost clock speeds. These will happen for a short time, the computer will overheat and then slow down. And that hot cold fast slow puts strain on the machine. I’ve actually disabled that Precision Boost Overclock and the computer is running at a constant 100% at a comfortable 67 degrees C at the moment. Here’s what it was doing before, at idle :

The 53 degrees was at the low point of the graph, it was spiking up to 75 degrees C. That’s really dangerous for electronics. When it was on load, it seemed stable (you’ll get processing errors or the dreaded Blue Screen of Death) but I think it was derating at 87 degrees C. This agrees with what Tomshardware put in today’s article. They had a machine under load and … turned the cooling off to see what would happen.

Sensible people don’t do that. Unless they have something they don’t care about breaking. That seems to be a common theme with the hardware review sites. They will run kit to destruction without much second thoughts, which makes other people attempt to do the same …

Anyway. Meltdown after 6 weeks now is utterly stable. Totally solid. And it actually has an easier time playing Elite than when it’s doing those SETI sums ! Elite maybe uses 30% of its capability. It feels a little smoother although when things were getting busy in the combat zone, it was getting jumpy. Odd.

That makes me think of an older laptop. It was an Acer Aspire running another AMD chip, an ancient Athlon X2 running at 2GHz. Except when you wanted that performance, like when watching streamed video, it would overheat, derate itself down to 0.8GHz and the video would go super choppy.

That brings me back to that “I’ll come back to this later.”. Just because someone says you need the top graphics card and the best processor, doesn’t mean that’s what you should buy. Always look at your own requirements. They won’t be the same as anyone else’s.

The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 was Just Right for what I want. Plenty of power, acceptable price at £190. I wasn’t convinced that the next one up (Ryzen 5 3600X at £256) gave sufficient extra to justify the price. By saving that money, I could go up to more memory, which definitely has a benefit. An 8GB machine struggled with Battletech and the Roguetech mod was unplayable. 16GB would have coped better. 32GB was strong and gives future proofing.

Someone who isn’t interested in gaming with great graphics (one who likes Stellaris and avoids Wolfenstein perhaps) could go for the cheaper processor with built in graphics. You can get one of those for £95 or £145. I think the £145 one is the one to go for there because it has 4 cores and 8 threads instead of 4 cores and 4 threads. That makes a difference apparently.

I don’t need a new graphics card. I have an 18 month old nVidia 1060 3GB card that cost £200 and could be replaced for the same amount now. A newer card would be a genuine improvement but … do I need to spend £320 on a shiny new 2060 with this ray tracing feature ?

Nope.

Not quite that nope.

To be honest, I’d rather save that money and buy a better flight stick. Who am I kidding. I’d rather spend the money and buy one of these :

You have to get your priorities right. That Lego Star Destroyer is very expensive though. (And I wouldn’t be able to get it on VIP release anyway because my Lego VIP account is fatally broken).

Expensive … but TOTALLY AWESOME and I want it.

That feels like a long wall of text today … here’s some key points :

Trust No One especially when they’re trying to spend your money. It’s your money. Spend it how you please. Don’t spend it to please others.
Make your own mind up.
Stick to your requirements. Anything extra is nice (especially if it involves cake) but … ask if there’s something nicer that the money could go on.
Sometimes it’s best to stay within design limits than try and push them too far.

Throw out prejudices that are no longer relevant. It’s good to do this in every aspect of your life occasionally, not just when it concerns things you are buying.

PS The only change I would have made to Meltdown’s spec in hindsight would have been to research the box more and get a better one.

The gaming world has been alive with the sound of music lately.

Yep.

(as always with the pictures, click for bigger)

The music and theme tunes of World of Warcraft Classic. That one will never catch on, it’s just a more cartoony Everquest clone. Right ? Haha, maybe.

One thing about WoW over the years, it’s had great music. Varied music. Music that makes you a little bit nuts sometimes. Quite possibly music by someone who’s been in the gaming news lately. We shall not speak his name due to what he’s been doing. Enough about him, back to WoW !

I’m not going back into WoW Classic. At least, I haven’t been pulled into the addiction just yet. I think if I did reinstall it, I’d actually go to the current version with all of the expansions.

That one’s from new WoW. Spot that telltale shift to 16:9 resolution … We’ll come back to new WoW. This one’s more about the old times and a bit of a journey.

I first started playing WoW in early 2005 and little did I know it … but it would be a significant part of my life for quite a while to come. It led to some mental issues. Aggro with friends. Aggro caused by people we were required to play with for various reasons. Other issues. You see, the relationship I had at the time broke up in mid 2005 with my partner moving out. I had seen that coming … but didn’t want to be the one to make the move. WoW ended up filling in the hole that the failed relationship left. And possibly worse than that, there was someone lovely in one of the other guilds who was instrumental in setting up the raiding guild alliance that we had going. At that particular time, I was rebounding on a bunch of people and getting very confused when it didn’t go anywhere. Cue more of those mental issues.

There were some good times. Some awesome times. But I’d found myself in a position where I was the head of a smaller guild that raided with others … and at this time, raids needed 40 people working together to a common goal. Lots. At least it wasn’t the brutal raiding that followed where the game became very punishing to small errors. Those issues steadily increased to the point where I absolutely required myself to take a break from the game for a few months and hand over the reins of the guild.

I was always seen as an experienced, high quality player … but never again took up a position of being an officer in a guild. Yeah, there’s prestige … but what’s that worth in the end in a game ? Not much, it’s definitely not worth the hassle, stress and occasional death threat that comes with it. Yes. I had a death threat from an individual that we kicked out of our guild for lying, cheating, stealing and generally being an obnoxious so and so. The guild officers had to act as enforcers to get people to behave and because I was the Guild Master and later ex-Guild Master, people looked at me to essentially be the executioner. You’d upset some, get the applause from others.

And there were other people like the one with the death threat. So it was a combination of the raid mechanics and the people we had to play with which led to me becoming really unsatisfied with the Warcraft endgame. Going into gaming addiction that far does some odd things to the mind as well, which may well look apparent if you go back to some of those 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and so on posts.

However … find a good guild with great people and, it’s an incredible game to chill out in.

And there’s a few of those great people down there. Guildlink and the Mercenaries were a great crowd while that lasted. I hopped sideways into a guild with a bunch of lovely Swedish people called Violence Reborn. Another group of awesome people and Krinza helped me out considerably with those mental issues just by being a fantastic friend.

The Violence Reborn people joined our little collective after an incident which saw a bit of a schism with another group leaving. Our little group of crazy mages had gotten used to one person looking after us and then … suddenly Sandra playing Krinza. That was a fun, healing raid after the other group left under a cloud. I think I was quite quickly sending whispers like “I like this one, can we keep her ?” to our raid leader lady. That’s a memory I’ll hopefully keep around while others have faded ! Lots of fun and craziness was had that day.

There were quite a few more fantastic friends along the way as well.

With great gear. This was an ongoing joke in the raiding. Some of us had some comedy gear which we brought out when we were … off duty ?

Yep. There were more than a few times when I’d sidle up to someone, say something daft and quickly grab that screenshot before they could leg it.

And there were shinies too. One of the best memories is when we staged a commando raid to smuggle our guild group of Dark Mercenaries into the Alliance (sworn enemies) capitals and into the tram tunnel that connects two of those cities. There was a rumour of a sea monster living under there :

Yep. That’s us, dressed in tuxedos and party dresses, infiltrating to the heart of the enemy, giggling like schoolkids all the way. The best of times.

It was really important to know where to stand when giant enemies fell around you.

Standing near things that gave you health was handy too.

There may have been some shameful behaviour along the way but. COOKIES !

I also chased other things later …

Chasing Rainbows is a guild that was set up by lovely youtuber and now streamer, Katherine of Sky (link’s over to the right). She has a lovely soothing voice, possibly one of the best voices in gaming. And a lovely lady too. She plays mostly Factorio but there was a little spell last year when the Chasing Rainbows guild was set up. I really enjoyed my (admittedly pretty short before I suddenly walked away from the game) time with them.

That panda was fierce.

Also had a sister mage with a Pointy Hat. Gear is important. Getting that gear stylish … critical.

I really enjoyed the time in old WoW but I don’t think I’ll be going back in. (Gaming Addiction can have its way with you when you least expect it). There were good times, bad times and along the way, a lot of very awesome people.

There’s a few old friends and fantastic people in that shot. But it did become time to sail off into the sunset after a while and I found a perfect escort …

Also random conga line.

It’s been fun looking through the screenshots again and remembering those good times again, with the Mercenaries, with Violence Reborn, with Guildlink, with Chasing Rainbows and the little group of local friends I was in a guild with too.

PS Addon – ancient high fives to the wonderful and let’s see how many of these I remember : Souleater, Zaphyr, Fubb, Charge, Sarai, Krinza, Cloudberry, all of Dad’s Army, Doomprayer, Sam & Aella, Tananka, Marracy, Tufflan, Alex, Laina, DT, Evi, Truthseeker’s family of alts …. and there are so, so many more.