Year: 2019

Day 9 !

What’s behind the doors today ?

Another Gingerbread Marshmallow today. Not their best, still really good :-).

We have another minifigure today, in the form of Luke the Jedi Master. I’m wondering what he’ll get up to in the last film.

The Mass Effect character is the deeply tragic, Thane Krios. He’s introduced in Mass Effect 2 as a Drell assassin hired to help you out. You meet him on a mission where he’s on his way to fulfil a contract (i.e. assassinate) an insane Asari lady who you actually come across in the first game. He’s silently staying just a few steps ahead as you make your way through the mission and you meet up at the end. A tragic figure, he suffers from Kepral’s Syndrome as a result of his race being transplanted from a desert world to a humid, ocean covered world. This condition is terminal for our brave assassin so he’s using what time he has left in the cause of our protagonist.

I didn’t use Thane in game much but his tale is especially compelling. From his introduction, through exposition around missions, to his eventual fate. That last scene is another of the reasons why I haven’t been able to play through Mass Effect 3 again, the writing, characters and their various fates brings out all the emotions and feels.

What can I say, the Mass Effect series has some incredible characters and very special voice acting to bring those characters to life.

The Elitecember theme for today is Scanning and … I don’t think I have any Elite screenshots for you today on that theme … However.

In honour of the wonderful Potato Queen Cmdr Kolo (link to twitch on the right), I present :

He’s giving that potato a good long look. Not happy with the right arm on this one and the wing limb could do with being a lot lower but … This one is another graphics tablet plus GIMP again and I like some of GIMP’s features more than I do Corel Painter Essentials. The Corel product has far better choice of brushes to draw with though as GIMP is limited to Pencil, Painter or Airbrush plus tools like the dodge tool I’ve used to create the white highlights.

That one was the warm up … This is the main one :

Click for bigger and more readable references.

I’m at a loss for tomorrow’s Elite pics though. The theme is Type 10 and … I’ll save griping about that one for tomorrow.

Later !

PS I know what the dwagon holding the potato needs … More fingers ! The pose was intended to be a hand holding the potato from below but I think it needed something different.

Hello everyone,

Day 8 of Advent ! What’s behind the doors today :

There we go.

Another Mint Choc Chip marshmallow today – this one was lush last time so I’m looking forward to eating this one. (Yep, it has survived so far, I thought I should get something more proper in me first !)

Not too sure that the Lego item is today though … (quick peek at spoiler places later, it’s the island in Last Jedi).

In the background we have the daily Mass Effect lore pic and it’s the turn of Miranda Lawson today. She turned up in the second game and was essentially your handler and ship Executive Officer. Except it doesn’t really work out that way in games like that and she’s essentially another member of the crew with specific talents who you can bring along on missions. In the case of Miranda, she had been genetically improved for intelligence, looks and biotic power.

This character got a lot of stick for that and for good reasons too …

The biotic powers weren’t quite as good as the other primary biotics (spoiler redacted but I fell foul of it in my first play through).
The intelligence wasn’t brought out in the character development and writing.
The looks were exploited by means of That Outfit and the poses which the animation team put the character in.

I liked Miranda … but I was cringing at certain elements of the characterisation which, as said above, were just plain exploitative. Her counterpart, Jacob, had similar issues … he just played with his guns and did crunches all day. Nothing more interesting than that.

It’s a shame too because the other characters were far more fleshed out and intelligently written, making you have genuine feelings for them. I’m sure there are a few more of those coming up and I’ll write about them as their turn comes.

The Elite theme for today is Orrery and it’s another where I struggled to find something I could draw something for, outside of screenshots. The usual view of solar systems in Elite is like :

The system is represented in a logical format, showing you the stars, planets and whether there is anything juicy to look at. This one is Jambo Dadi, where I was enjoying doing some bounty hunting yesterday. The Orrery is a more 3d representation of the system :

And there we go. I don’t think that actually tells you much ?

That’s the system map for our Solar System. In Elite terms, we have a pretty complicated solar system with lots of moons and moonlets orbiting around the bigger planets. (Click for bigger and hopefully readable text and … picture’s from the wiki). The typical interesting systems tend to have between 10 and 20 objects to have a look at.

Scanning’s tomorrow actually, I should do some more prep for that.

May add something later too … my Elite character is about 500 ly away from Sol at the moment but I may well add in a picture of how our place looks in the two views. Actually, let’s do that …

There’s the system map. Looks like they’ve added in a bunch of extra-solar objects over to the right there and just counted the smaller moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

There’s the outer system Orrery, showing the gas giants and those extra-solar objects …

And finally, the inner system. The Orrery nicely shows the representation of how far apart the various objects are.

That’s it for today I think !

Day 7 !

What’s behind the doors today ?

In the foreground, we have Chewbacca doing something horrible with a Porg over the fire, plus a S’Mores marshmallow. Tasty, tasty S’Mores marshmallow.

Today’s Mass Effect pic is Tali’Zorah vas Neema, as she starts in the second game. Tali is a beloved character in the game series, voiced admirably by Ash Sroka (IMDB link). It’s a pretty short list there but I know she’s been in more roles (like the Xenophile advisor in Stellaris) and she really brings Tali’Zorah to life. There are many amazing characters in the Mass Effect series and Tali is quite possibly, the most loved of them all.

And it’s the voice acting that turns the words into something that makes that happen.

One curious thing is that the Quarian race of which Tali is one of, is a very slightly different race to the norm. Pretty much all of the Mass Effect intelligent races are bipedal humanoid in shape, with variances along that theme. So the Turians (Garrus from yesterday) and the Quarians have exoskeletons and need different food. The Quarians also have an extra joint in their legs, which coincidentally makes them look like they wear high heels all the time.

They are also forced to live in ships, the Migrant Fleet, after being evicted from their homeworld by the artificially intelligent Geth and consequentially, inside environmentally sealed suits as they have minimal immune systems. This also drives their naming convention, so Tali’Zorah vas Neema is Tali of the family Zorah of the ship Neema.

It’s all part of making a fantastic universe to dip in to as you play.

Today’s Elite theme is “White Dwarf”, another where I’m not sure how I would have pulled off a drawing. But … I do have screenshots ….

Oh wait. Wrong White Dwarf. I can’t remember how many of these I bought over the years ! White Dwarf was a gaming magazine owned and run by Games Workshop, who you may recognise from how they’ve expanded into being a pretty ubiquitous presence. They’ve done well too, instead of exploding and imploding like so many others who rapidly established a presence, they’ve survived where so many have disappeared.

Some of that is probably due to being able to exploit their market … they are pretty much the only wargame miniature figure producers. But it’s also because people are highly interested in playing with the stuff. Their games are all over the place and some of that is copying from those who came before (orcs, dwarves, elves …), some of that is making the rules easy to understand and play.

I started buying White Dwarf at issue 98 and back then, it was a mix of background articles, rules previews, tutorial guides on building models and painting them and it had huge amounts in there of artwork in both the drawn and modelling world.

The sad realisation came though a few years later that it wasn’t so much a hobbyist magazine any more, it had turned in to a marketing arm aimed at selling their product. I lost interest and walked away from buying it. Part of that was down to eliminate buying stuff that wasn’t food though. Yeah, been there, it’s not fun. But then I started working and my finances looked up from there on in.

What is a White Dwarf in the real world ?

The in game graphics may not be representative of the real stars !

Here we have the Searching for Biscuits looking on at a rapidly vibrating White Dwarf star. They are degenerate stars at the end of their life which are in a cooling phase. They’ve burned up all of their fuel, gone through the expansion in to a red giant like Betelgeuse and started contracting and cooling as their fuel source runs out. They start at a particular size (between 8 and 10 solar masses), outside of which other things will happen to the star, like degeneration in to a neutron star or a nova explosion.

The colour comes from what happens when the hydrogen fuel runs out. Normally stellar fusion will start with Hydrogen with one proton and fuse it into heavier elements like Helium (2 protons), Lithium (3 protons), Beryllium (4 protons) and then into Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen. Stellar fusion is how everything in the galaxy becomes more than the base protons, neutrons and electrons. And novae and supernovae are how those elements become spread throughout the galaxy, to form the worlds that orbit younger stars. But before then, the balance of the elements in the star determines their colour (spectroscopy) with the carbon and oxygen in the White Dwarf producing that colour.

There’s more about them in the wiki page (link!).

Astronomy is a great science to dip in to occasionally, although it can get mind bending.

Cya tomorrow.

Hello everyone !

Still tired today so I haven’t ventured out to Bath Xmas Market … although that will mean some more time for Internet Spaceships and shooting things in the Fer-De-Lance, amongst other things.

What’s in the box today ?

There we go. It’s a New Republic / Resistance transport ship, as seen in The Force Awakens. I suspect we’ll see these again in Rise of Skywalker.

I’ve tried something else today … a stage ! Yes. It’s a D&D 4th edition expansion book. The Mass Effect book is pretty large, so I thought I needed something to lift everything up so that I could easily get everything in shot.

I think it’ll evolve into having something larger as my stage in the days to come. The underside of a Star Wars Advent Calendar box (I think last year’s !) may well do nicely.

But wait … there is something missing in that picture.

Hmm.

What was that again ?

Today’s marshmallow was a Milk and Cookies marshmallow and it may have disappeared (mysteriously) before even getting to the stairs that lead to where I’m taking the pictures.

How about the internet spaceships ? No drawing today sadly. Not really feeling it and I’ll take the next couple of days off drawing too unless a daft idea pops into the head. I’d like to try drawing faces again, perhaps looking to keep it simple too. Some of the best drawings I see are really simple coloured line art that just rely on precision and a good idea.

The other thing about taking a couple of days out of the drawing practice is the themes … I could echo a picture of today’s theme (Anaconda) but I’m not convinced for White Dwarf and Orrery. But … I do have screenshots !

I went off investigating again, at hearing the rumour of another crashed ship with potential TREASURE. Alas, it looked like the site had been picked fairly clean already but there was a little more to the tale to see.

The stern actually looked fairly undamaged.

And the rear section of this Anaconda looked fairly ok too.

Erm … that doesn’t look right. I think it’s missing something. Like half the bow section.

I’d just like it to be known at this point that I wasn’t the pilot. Honest.

And a better view of the port side. That one left a mark ! Looks like something impacted and then punched right through the side of the ship. No wonder it went down hard.

I’ve found a few more of these mighty ships along the journeys into the beyond …

Yep. Didn’t crash that one either.

I haven’t owned an Anaconda in Elite for quite some time. I stopped playing my second commander before getting there and I think I didn’t own one for long with my first. It’s a great all rounder but a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none only one.

Let’s see – at that level of end game ship, the alternatives are :
Type 9 freighter – biggest cargo capacity (756t in mine)
Federal Corvette – best combat going on warship level (but needs unlocking)
Imperial Cutter – best trader, taking over from the Type 9 when you unlock it
Type 10 – dunno what anyone would use this for
Beluga – built to be a passenger liner
The Anaconda holds maybe 450t as a cargo ship but …

It’s an awesome exploration ship. The one I eventually have will have a 70ly jump range, even with an extra fuel tank, which makes it quite superior to the 65ly jump range Krait Phantom I’ll use next.

But there’s a little while and a few ships to go through before then.

Cya tomorrow !

PS And I got the day wrong again. Oops ! Fixed.

Hello everyone,

Work Xmas Munchie thing today. It was good.

Instead of the typical thing where a heap (think 100+) people head off for the end of year munchie meal, my team has been doing a smaller one for the last couple of years. It’s worked pretty well, we went to a place called 3 Brothers Burgers again today. Instead of the usual one bite feeds all (no it doesn’t) sheep dip quality meal that you get from the big places, proper burger and tasty. I did take a pic but I’ll hold it back until later.

(Erm – post ed – it’s really badly affected by motion blurring so … no pic)

It was a good burger, with great company from the team too. They’re probably still going at it too in town. I’ve been feeling like I’ve been bouncing on the reserves point of my personal batteries though, so I headed off home between meal and inevitable pubcrawl.

What’s behind the door today ?

I do like the X Wing starfighter. It’s a good design (although it’s done for looks more than what they actually do with the design). That’s the thing with Star Wars stuff, it tends to look great … but the actual functionality rarely makes sense. That’s overthinking things though, they’re still fun movies to watch.

Anyway – X Wing starfighter … the wings allow for atmospheric flight, if a canny designer was involved there would be reaction control (roll and pitch) thrusters at the end of the wings and the pilot is smack bang in the middle. Having the thrusters far out means they’re more effective. And the wings give a good spread for the laser blasters. If the pilot is at the middle of the craft at the centre of rotation, it means they are more or less immune to the forces involved when spinning, when yawing, pitching and rolling.

Yep. I like the X Wing … and may have (counts on fingers) … I think it’s 5 Lego ones now.

The marshmallow it’s sitting on is Salted Caramel flavour, which is one of the more subtle ones. Still a favourite and I’ll pick up a packet of that flavour when I get chance.

The Mass Effect picture of the day is Liara T’Soni :

She’s one of the favourite Non Player Characters from the series. You pick her up on a planet in the first game and she has a combination of soft, smart, innocent, gritty. The Mass Effect series was blessed with many great characters and Liara was one of the best.

The Elite prompt for the day was stars … I was wondering how I’d do this one and then thought I’d try replicating a chalkboard picture style today. I’m still coming to terms with the tools on offer and instead of a Chalk style painting tool, I was using GIMP’s airbrush on a black background. This was the first time I’ve used the graphics tablet in GIMP, so far I’ve only been using it in Painter Essentials.

I couldn’t resist a couple of easter eggs again.

Here’s one I screenshotted a while ago :

Hmm …

Hopefully my sun came out ok. Ship’s dodgy but I can live with that.

I think that’s the one where I started looking for a place to hide from the sun.

That one was a pretty place.

Tired now. Off work tomorrow burning up that flexi credit (and replenishing the batteries).

Cya !

PS Actually need to open up the game again ! Haven’t played since last week and I have a couple of screenshots I need to set up and collect …

Day 5 !

What’s in the box … or behind the doors :

A gun emplacement for the stormtrooper today. The marshmallow is Gingerbread flavoured, not so good as the previous days, still tasty.

Over to the Elitecember challenge !

It’s Guardians today and my brain went somewhere odd with the drawn picture :

Hopefully that one is fairly recognisable, even without the words making it more obvious. Mantis is a favourite of mine from the Guardians but I’m not keen on that mouth.

I think I’m learning …. very, very slowly :-D. I should draw other things than dwagons, one reason being is that their lower halves feel very difficult to draw.

Talking of drawing other things, here is another Guardian :

People love the little guy. Although instead of Baby Yoda, I think that’s more like Middle Aged Yoda.

How about these Elite Guardians though ? The lore has them being a precursor empire race, which has disappeared from our section of the galaxy, leaving behind ruins, secrets and mysteries to uncover. I haven’t gone into the Guardians too much, outside of acquiring the widget that boosts your hyperspace jumping range … but I do have some screenies :

I have to admit, these are from a post from a little while ago. Here I am in the rover, checking out an artifact.

The mystery involves running around, unlocking the pillars, completing the puzzle …

Avoiding the automated defences, including the occasional missile that gets thrown your way … Here is the ship providing an umbrella of anti air defence. The light show was pretty spectacular in game.

And then you get the prize at the end. Totally not getting shot at from off screen there.

And then there’s the final one of the collection.

I’ll have to go back at some point and find one of these locations in daylight. The lighting works pretty well in game but it’s also quite dark. It’s nice to have a bit of light there to show off what’s around in the landscape.

More tomorrow ! Let’s see … “Star”. Off out tomorrow, so I may not have time for a quick sketch plus I’m not sure what I’d draw for Star too. I think it’ll be screenshots when I get home tomorrow.

Day 3 !

Been a busy day today, with an away trip for a meeting away from where I normally work and then back to do shopping on the way home before settling in now to watch a few more episodes of the Mars series.

Oh – never go shopping while hungry. I now have donuts. And lots more stuff.

What’s behind the doors today ?

A stormtrooper and a Butterscotch marshmallow. Lush again. The butterscotch taste kicks in a second or so after that first bite. Good times.

Oh and don’t worry about the stormtrooper aiming at it like he thinks it needs shooting … they never hit.

In the background is another theme I’ll be running for as long as it lasts, that’s Femshep from the Mass Effect games. She’s a space marine who runs headlong into a quest to save the galaxy from mysterious unstoppable machine intelligences who come back every few 10,000 years to eradicate all life from the galaxy that has progressed past a certain technology level. Mass Effect gave us a wonderful series of games and I must play it again.

Oh and Femshep, best shep. One reason I tend to play female characters in games is because I like the voice acting more and Jennifer Hale (who voices Femshep) is one of the very best voice actors.

What’s the Elite theme for today ? It’s the iconic Cobra Mk3, star of the original game going back to 1984. I may have attempted a real drawing with a pen on paper. Check this out :

Couldn’t resist adding the mini dwagon.

Anyway, how does it compare to the original ?

There we go. The ships to bottom left and in the centre are Cobras, the little ones are Sidewinders, centre right is a Python and I think the bottom right is a Fer-de-Lance.

The original game, released in 1984, was a complete marvel. It fit into the 32kbytes of memory that the BBC B microcomputer contained and pushed the limits of what was possible with those machines by presenting a fully 3d environment with wireframe 3d graphics.

Computers and graphics have come a long way since then though :

That’s the Cobra Mk3 Keelas Wings, approaching an engineers base for a landing and a souping up of the hyperdrive.

It’s good too that the new game went back to some of the gameplay systems of the original game. The two games in the middle (Frontier Elite 2 and Frontier 2) went for a fully Newtonian physics model which … didn’t really work for gameplay. Instead of close, exciting dogfighting, combat was either at slow speeds at stations or an exercise in high speed jousting which just wasn’t fun. But in going back to a … funsized? flight model that’s a bit like how Star Wars treats physics, the space flying is a lot more engaging and fun.

Good times indeed.

When kicking off this month’s worth of postings, I’d intended to only do maybe 4 drawings but … I think I’ll try for more. You only get better at something if you practice and I’m not really at the Getting Better stage of practice, I’m more at the Learning The Tools level of practice.

The pictures by the end won’t be masterpieces but … hopefully people will like them !

Cya tomorrow.

Advent Day 2 !

And a sketchy sketchy of a space station. But first … What’s behind the doors ?

We have a Mint Choc Chip marshmallow, which was delicious and is making me want to order some online right now. Here you go – a link ! (Not Sponsored) That temptation is a very tempting temptation.

Oh and there’s Kylo Ren’s Command Shuttle there as well, a very mean looking craft when it appears on screen. Bigger than your average shuttle to be sure and well armed as well.

Elite theme of the day is Stations and I have a few of those to have a natter about. Let’s start with a loose sketch :

I’ll get to some more later but that’s my thought. The designs of space stations are heavily wrapped up in gravity and how you deal with that, how you use it, how you are bound by it and how the physics of the universe interact with the components. So what we have there is a station with concentric rings, with a pair of modules on the spindle in the middle.

This is a spin gravity station, where the whole thing depends on varying levels of centripetal force. That is, it is bound by Newton’s 3 Laws :
1 – An object in motion will remain in motion unless an external force acts on it.
If you whack a puck across ice, it’ll keep going … only slowing due to the friction forces acting on it.
2 – Force equals mass times acceleration
We’ll come back to that one later. It rules the Weight equation.
3 – For every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction.
If you catch a cricket ball, then your hand exerts a force stopping the ball and the ball exerts a force on your hand.

So with space stations with spin gravity, every object will head off in a line straight in to space … unless something exerts a force. The outer side of each ring becomes the floor and exerts a force on everything on it, which replicates gravity. The greater diameter of the circle, the more linear velocity and the more force exerted to accelerate objects around in the circle.

Aside – gravity is a different type of force where heavy stuff exerts a force on other stuff with mass. However, it takes a lot of mass (like a planet) to make it have any significant force to stop things flying off it in to space. That kind of mass isn’t practical to put in to a space station and might well attract the planet your station is orbiting or at the least, affect its weather like our Moon (with 1/6 G) affects our tides.

What it means for Stuff On Your Station is :
Things towards the centre have low gravity. Rings towards the outsides have higher gravity.

Everything we do depends more or less on gravity. Our bodies degrade in low and micro gravity, while industrial processes can work better without the influence of gravity. It’s all much of a muchness there. The Expanse covers the medical side of this extremely well. Low gravity medicine is good for relieving the stress on the body … however zero gravity is critically bad for injured parties because our bodies depend on our circulation system being able to pump fluid around and generally remove the Bad Stuff.

There’s a lot more to it than that and that’s without going into things like Fission Power, where our nuclear reactors mostly depend on a hot/cold convection circle that needs gravity to operate.

Enough science ? One more thing …

Weight and gravity aren’t all of the story. Everything has mass. (Weight is Mass times Gravitational Acceleration – see Newton’s 2nd Law). One thing I think the Elite stations are missing is warehousing for cargo … this is moved best in microgravity. The cargo still has mass and inertia … but a person who could move 1 tonne (slowly) in zero gravity would have minimal chance of lifting it even in 0.1g (100kg).

Gravity is the key to everything. Shall we look at some stations ? Here goes !

That’s a Coriolis fly by in Elite, with the Needs More Pew Pew Cobra Mk4. This is a tribute back to the original game, which was heavily into geometric wireframe shapes. There is a “trench” around the face with the docking envelope on these stations that I’ll try to fly around at some point. One issue with these stations is that because they have flat sides, the Coriolis Effect kicks in. Unless you’re in the centre of a face, Up from the floor is not necessarily Up as spin gravity would have it … Which would have some nasty effects on your balance !

There’s an Elite station from a little while ago. Bit damaged but a nice example of a spin gravity station. One issue I have with these is the legs that go to the outsides, why are they bent ? Plus there isn’t usually too much outside the spine that connects everything together, so transit up and down the station is always in changing gravitational conditions. I.e. no spin gravity, just acceleration from the transit cart stopping and starting meaning that the floor and roof interchange.

Elite also has Outposts, which are essentially modules welded together with no main docking bay. These make sense with the other type of gravity – technological gravity. Grav plating in the floor of the type Star Trek and most other scifi like to use.

Moving swiftly on from that one :-D. Gravity makes absolutely no sense on that.

There’s an awesome space station. It’s Babylon 5 and this one uses spin gravity where that makes sense … and grav plate cheating for where it’s convenient for the story.

This one has a central cylinder with the habitation decks inside and a fantastic park / passive oxygen generation in the cylinder as well. This even becomes a plot point as a character leaps out of a transit cart to avoid a bomb, to realise that when he reaches the other side of the cylinder, it’s going to hurt a lot. The spin gravity turns people around as well, so if you’re going 50m/s right at the top, you’re going 50m/s left at the bottom. If you take a short cut across the middle, you’ll hit the bottom at 100m/s. OUCH.

The docking bay is at the top on this station, between the forks. The ships are then moved around to their berths, which is only shown a couple of times in the series. The curious thing is how Stuff is moved from the zero g docking bay sections to the sections in spin gravity. Newton’s Third Law will also make the stationary part tend to spin.

Actually that’s another thing – there is a gyroscopic effect as well, aka precession. A force on one side of the rotating wheel will make the wheel turn in another direction. Mixing spinning things with stationary things can mean awkwardness. (Which you’d manage with thrusters and reaction wheels).

One more station ? Here’s an iconic one :

As space stations go, this one is particularly good. It’s a technological gravity station, which means it doesn’t need to spin at all.

One issue with spinning stations is that the really big ships will be limited. They’ll have to stay outside and use shuttles to transfer people and cargo around. With Deep Space Nine, the big ships can dock up to the pylons with other ships connecting to the outer docking ring which also has the warehousing facilities.

It’s a lovely station and makes a great setting for a Star Trek show that consistently delivered massively high quality. And we hadn’t seen much like it before.

That’s one thing that keeps me flying around the Elite universe, all of the variation ! Difference is good.

More tomorrow. Dunno if I’ll be drawing a Cobra Mk3 though :-D. Definitely less of a science bomb tomorrow :-D.

Hello everyone,

Advent day 1 ! It feels like this year has gone around at a massive rush. Other people have said that too but for me, I think it’s because I’ve been a lot busier at work with trips out of the office to see things that I can’t talk about here :-D.

So here I am, on the Sunday morning, writing up post number 1 of Advent and December ! What’s on the menu for today :

I have to admit, I had my doubts when opening the tin foil packaging. Had the rolling of time gotten to my marshmallow like it gets to many things ? Had the bugs beaten me to it ?

Today it was a S’mores marshmallow and the description is “A S’mores gourmet marshmallow, embedded with finest milk chocolate chunks and rolled generously in caramelised biscuit crumb.” Haha, that sorts that out !

It was as gorgeous as it looks there. I.e. very tasty and I’m looking forward to the rest now. I do like the stuff from Naked Marshmallow Company (not sponsored). The marshmallows have a lovely texture and the flavours they add in are above subtle but not overpowering. Much better than the bland stuff you get in supermarkets where you can’t tell any difference between the pink ones and the white ones.

What’s the Lego bit ? I think it’s one of the ships, probably from the Star Wars Resistance animations. But I don’t watch those. Wonder if anything from The Mandalorian will sneak in to the advent calendar this year ? Maybe. That’s another one I’m not watching because I really don’t want to be paying for multiple subscribed streaming channels.

There’s another thing happening this advent too, as promised in the last post. Elitecember ! Today’s post was “Commander” and the idea was probably that you take a picture of your current commander and draw something around that. The pilots in game look like this :

There we go, on the right. That’s Commander Keela from just before the character reset. The 5 weeks play time is across both of the characters I had at the time and I’m now at (quick check) 6 weeks 6 hours played. I’ve enjoyed coming back in to the game for that extra week and it feels like the character has achieved much more. Like … having a credit balance of 830million and higher ranks across the board.

I have to admit that I don’t actually have a screenshot of my current commander. You set them up in character generation and … never look at them again. Although you can just about see Cmdr Ice if you zoom in close to the Gingery Nonsense :

I had to go to the high res version of that because the reduced size pic from Thursday was about 6 pixels high.

So … no official commander pic. That can only mean … Here we go :

There we go. Zoom in close for the details.

There’s hopefully a few details you can pick out in there like a modified Royal Navy Commander insignia (that’s a Sidewinder on top), the RN salute and the headset. Have a peek at the medals too. I think this one has turned out better than some of the others, although I felt really out of practice when creating this one yesterday. Need more practice. Most of the Elitecember pics are going to be screenshots from the game but I’ll be drawing some of them.

A pilot needs a ship though :

Cmdr Dwagon would like to welcome you aboard the Dragonbug, to take you where you need to go, to haul your valuables or … to see the pretty sights :

Fly safe and have a great December.

Advent is almost here !

This year seems to have flown by. It’s been a very busy year, definitely busier than it usually has been for me. Definitely looking forwards to the winter break.

But first … I haven’t been posting nearly as regularly or often as I usually do. I have a target or guide of 100 posts in the year and I’ll definitely miss that. Only 56 so far, so with this one and 31 over December, that’ll make 87.

But …. what’s coming ? Sneak preview first and it’s an internet spaceship :

She’s the Gingery Nonsense, named after one of the streamer ladies that I’ve been enjoying watching : HelloItsKolo. Link on the right. She plays Elite Dangerous (looks amazing), Planet Zoo (looks tempting) and assorted other games too but those have been the main ones and she’s been a joy to watch since I was steered her way by the lovely HeyChrissa.

But … meme ! What’s coming in December :

Yep. One of those too.

Also posh marshmallows. Will have to give you a taste report for every day of those.

Don’t think I’ll be toasting them though. It feels a bit of a shame to toast the posh marshmallows because they taste so good.

But what’s the meme ?

There we go. It was originally intended for Inktober … but I missed that so here we go for something inspired by that coming through December.

A lot of those are Elite references that will definitely not mean much to people who don’t play the game. I’ll write things about them for each day. Although …. not all the pics will be from Elite.

Yep. Gonna have some fun with that.

I’ll need to draw though ! I have in mind drawings that will need to be done for at least 4 of those. Gotta get drawing again. I tend to rush through the finish of the drawings but people seem to like the results.

Or is it the cake.

Still, it’ll be good to draw again. And hopefully to bring forth a few chuckles too :-).

And the Elitecember thing gives me an excuse to buy chocolate coins ! Result.