Year: 2019

Some of those T-shirts definitely appeal…. Esp the Pew, Pew one….

It was Comic Con already last weekend !

Time is marching on fast. A good day out with a great friend. I’ll have another post coming up later for the cricket at Lords, no friend at that one but I did get hugs. More for the other post …

There seemed to be more cosplay on show this year. Some of it fun like the one above, some amazing;

Hello Queenie

Some furry … they must have been cooking in those ! The Excel arena by London’s docklands isn’t the most hospitable arena place. The air systems really can’t cope with so many people inside and it gets a bit steamy. You’d think they’d do something about that !

Lots to see though. From the Pikachu and Team Rocket, Detective Pikachu is definitely a movie I want to see.

Great chocobo.

Love the attitude on this one.

Definitely attitude there. Dunno about the fella behind though. Maybe he’s just been told that this Dalek just incinerated his ride home. Love the Alice here too. Oh … I’ve been in the Stellaris too and just completed the Determined Exterminator part of the achievement quest …

This is Comic Con though, so the merch game is strong. There’s one that I suspect my neighbour will be acquiring … Genki Gear has awesome stuff !

All of these were tempting but I managed to escape with just the “Dice are not your friends” t-shirt.

More there from Teeturtle.

Amazing models there.

And I was so close to acquiring one of these to put together.

I’ll have a picture coming soon for Team Donut day. Check out Rekha Sharma on the Twitters. She’s awesome and has been a great part of shows like Battlestar Galactica and lately on Star Trek Discovery.

But eventually it comes round to time to seek out that home in a galaxy far far away.

We hear you roar Mr Mayhew and we salute you.

It’s almost time to get back to the Pew Pew but not before :

A cute cheery wave for an Until Next Year.

A good show again. My friend and I weren’t feeling that great on the Sunday so we had a relaxed start and cruise around the show. A lot more cosplay was on show, from the hired outfits to full on custom specials. It all looked amazing and we definitely appreciated seeing it all.

Hurrah ! Week and a bit off starts here.

It does feel like I’m burning through the energy and the reserves especially quickly at the moment. Might mean that I’m more into what we’re doing at work than I was in my previous post. Maybe. It is really good to get out there and see the kit that we have and do things like relate what I’m seeing on the screens to what’s happening Out There.

Cue random screenshot for thumbnail and a Pink Planet. That’s the Searching For Tea, after returning from a fairly short jaunt around the Elite galaxy.

There are plans for the next week, Comic Con at the weekend should be awesome and then there’s the Lords day on Thursday. Looking forward to it, although I do want to regenerate a bit of energy before then.

Internet spaceships ? I have a loss of one to report ! Later. I left the story last week at one of the waystation planets and after that, it was a run through some more galactic beauty spots.

Another overnight halt saw me stop at the Conflux Abandoned Settlements above. Did they leave any tea behind ? I must return and investigate with a ship that has an exploration rover. (The Searching For Tea was a bit basic in that regard)

There were some really pretty sights along the way too, like this White Dwarf star with the faint rings and a nebula in the background. Elite is a very pretty game, especially when you see the X Ray streamers animate.

And another view, where you jump in next to two O class blue stars. O class stars are fairly young on the main sequence of stars, definitely younger than our G type. That’s affected by the size of star though, if I remember right, big stars burn fast, burn bright and go through the sequence to nova or black hole quickly.

That’s the effect from a neutron star with fairly slow rotation. When a star gets so old that it burns through its hydrogen, it will go through a giant phase and then explode with the remnants collapsing in on themselves. If the star is big enough (Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit and I am googling there), it will collapse into a black hole. Smaller stars collapse in on themselves up to the point where the protons, electrons and neutrons that make up elements are all squished together into neutrons and you get a gloopy solid mass of neutrons that’s pretty much as bad as a black hole for how destructive it will be to things that get too close.

Except a neutron Pulsar tends to continually spray off those X Ray streamers which are melty microwave death for anything inside a few light years, if anything is unlucky enough to be in the beam. Black holes can make these X-ray beams too if they’re eating something.

Neutron Stars make for very pretty images though.

And then there’s those things ….

Black holes are scary. I think it’s the very idea of them that sends my mind scurrying off to a dark corner. Where is this one ? If you look at the little neutron star over the Milky Way ribbon, the black hole is just to the left of it. You’ll see its effect from how it has smudged up that galactic ribbon. You don’t see the black hole, you see the effect it has on the light coming from behind it.

That’s an older picture from last year of Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. What’s eerie in game is how it portrays the light of the stars behind the black hole dancing around as you move around the singularity.

And then there’s this place, a White Dwarf, a normal sun and the gas giant making a super pretty sight as you jump in.

There was mild panic jumping in here between the two suns and ….

Brown Alert as the hyperspace jump here literally took the ship through the red dwarf behind the orange star.

Journey’s end came at the Pink Planet before going to an engineer base (bad lighting, no suitable screenshot). And a couple of evenings away from the game before trying some combat tonight. That’s the Mostly Toothless which was very good at exploding.

First ship loss ! May the Tortoise Beats Hare :

last a bit longer. That’ll be tomorrow’s fun after its engine arrives. You can soup up parts in the game, which is exactly what I’m doing … to one of each part and then sharing it around the ships :-D.

But yeah ! Enjoying the game, looking forward to a week off and definitely managing the RSI and exhaustion issues. Probably need to switch my diet up to something healthier. Still repairing from when I last did that !

I gotta find more things to write about !

Feels a bit like things are going whoosh by at the moment, although I am looking forward to another MCM Comic Con in London and the Lords T20 day at the end of the month. Oh and the annual Le Mans 24 hours watching.

Actually, I’m not that sure about Le Mans these days. It’s great to cheer on the Aston Martins but they are really boring races in the prototype classes. The Toyotas have so much more performance than the other prototypes and they are so reliable that they don’t make the mistakes or have the breakdowns that would let the competitors in. It is good to cheer on the Aston Martins though. I’ve actually been preferring to watch the Imsa series where there is much better competition in the prototype bracket and there are also a couple of Lexus cars to watch in the GT class.

Fun stuff. Oh and there’s Formula 1 as well, although that has its own frustrations due to races being affected by the very poor quality of some of the cars and about half of the drivers.

Bugs ? Yep. Bugs erupted on Sunday, I probably should have dipped out of doing a business road trip on Monday and have been keeping the bugs at home today and yesterday. It’s only light manflu. Notdedyet.

Still bugs though. I’ve been putting a dent in the coffee supply …

Internet spaceships ! I had a session on Sunday (and very nearly put big dents in the ship with a rather too rapid landing at the end …) but stayed out cos of those bugs yesterday and Monday. That’s after pretty much being in there for sessions all last week. What’s the pilot been up to ?

I’ll come back to this one. (Wanted a good thumbnail pic !)

Let’s see. I left the last post with pictures of the Needs More PewPew. It was unarmed, like all of my trading ships up to now. It’s not really worth arming them because it puts too much of a dent in the jump range and cargo capacity. With the class of ship I’ve gotten up to so far it’s better to run than fight. But I’ll be showing those random pirates what for soon.

The Empire’s Bounty followed the Needs More PewPew. This is a Type 6 freighter and it allowed a little more cargo room enabling faster progress through the missions. My character is now Baron iceangel of the Empire, which lets me own the Imperial Clipper. Here’s the last one I had :

A little photoshopped in that pic. The next one will be in a black paint job, be called Black Sheep and do missions for the Federation, enemy of the Empire. That’s in a little while though.

Next up after the freighter was the Dolphin class Porpoise Prospector, seen there looking at the abandoned Dav’s Hope settlement. The lore says that it was a mining settlement abandoned after the tunnels collapsed in on themselves, the settlement was then evacuated in a hurry with the inhabitants leaving all sorts of goodies behind. Stuff that’s good for modifying your ship for things like extended jump range.

That let me pick up this one, the Searching For Tea :

I’m off on a little jaunt with that one at the moment. I’ll update the link on the right with this EDSM link to my commander, which has a track of where I’m at currently in the game. The plan is to follow the route given by the Norma Arm Expedition, which will see me get most of the way to the galactic core. I’ll then head East for a while and then return in a generally triangular pattern. I’ll do the Galactic Core later in a different ship. Oh and Beagle Point too, which is the given name for the furthest point from Earth you can get to.

It’s good to have plans for the various ships. Like I intend to never to passenger carrying in the specialist passenger ships. They complain too much :-D. Exploring is good though and they’ve massively improved the exploration tool. Previously, you had to fly to each planetoid individually to scan them. Now, you can fire up the discovery tool and instantly see if there’s anything worth hanging around for. Like metal rich planets, earthlike planets, water worlds, ammonia worlds. Stuff that we’d be interested in knowing about as a culture looking to expand throughout the galaxy. Places with materials, places with life.

Places with an amazing view. They call that place “The View” in game and it’s an incredible sight with those rings illuminated purple by a dwarf star combined with the funnels of the neutron star in the distance. This is the place from the first picture from a little further away. I didn’t land at this one because even in low orbit, the gravity was cranking up to 3g+ and …. that old saying of “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one” doesn’t really apply in 3g when you’d be having issues breathing let alone walking !

The commander is currently sampling the tea at Eagle’s Landing :

A place with another pretty nebula view.

I’ve definitely been enjoying being back in the game since restarting. Going up the ships without cheating by skipping ahead with a few of them has been really good. In games like this that can get really grindy, it’s good to have goals along the way that break up that grind. Next ship will be a little combat racing ship, after that it’ll be a Keelback armed freighter that I’ll use for a spell of mining.

And there will be a few ships after that which my pilot should already have the credits for. Good times. That’s after I get back from the jaunt in Searching For Tea.

Maybe another explorer ship will be called Searching for Coffee. Or … I got one ! Searching For Mini Eggs.

Searching For Lego ?

11 days since last post …. oops. What have I been up to ? Let’s allow the non game stuff to be first up :

Mum trip ! Good trip. Nicely chilled out and good to see the mum and sister again. (There may also have been bonbons, sherbets and marshmallows raided too). Those away trips always wipe me out though and I’ve enjoyed chilling out this long weekend.

Which included books …. the Book Barn have been running a sale this weekend and I may have paid a visit. Almost didn’t because I woke up yesterday with a huge headache. Like one of those headaches that’s definitely interfering with rational thought. I’ll blame that for these being liberated :

Robert Heinlein – Podkayne of Mars and I Shall Fear No Evil
Kim Stanley Robinson – 2312
Greg Bear – Hull Zero Two
Larry Niven and Steve Barnes – The Descent of Anansi

The two Heinlein books are a couple of rare ones I don’t own yet, KSR wrote the excellent Mars series, always been curious about Greg Bear and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read from Larry Niven. I’ve finished off Embers Of War, more coming about that at some point.

It was also great having a lunchtime catch up with someone who’s been an amazing friend over the last few years too. I hope that the headache wasn’t making me too dour company :-).

I’ve definitely been enjoying being back in Elite though. Yesterday’s session was pretty awful for making progress (my combat ships were outclassed in the fights I was putting them in) but it did melt away that headache. I have more ships now. Many more ships …

Warning – picture spam incoming.

That’s the most spectacular though. This is a gorgeous game when the planets literally align. Here we have the Greater Dragonbug emerging from the space station when the orbiting planet was in total eclipse. Oh and look at that ring eclipse too.

That’s Greater Dragonbug, the Adder class sister ship to the Hauler.

That’s a smaller Viper 3 class ship, called Mini MagPew. There will be a lot of references appearing in these names. My last character had a Viper called Space Viking …. and the obscure reference follows from there.

Before finally escaping the new starter zone in the Cobra Mk3, Keelas Wings. A handy ship which got upgraded for early mission running, raising the cash for the next two. Trading and courier missions got very lucrative, especially for the smaller ships. However, it does help to know where the best systems for it are. Usually, the missions from one station will have their destinations distributed across the local area. Unless …. the local area only has a couple of stations in it. For those, all of the missions go to a couple of stations so you can do loads of courier jobs at the same time for more profit.

Oh and click for bigger in the screenshots !

Not completely aimless now. There is a plan ….

The plan may involve coffee.

It didn’t involve a new paintjob for this one after scraping across the landing pad down there. That’s Long Sight Base, which is on a higher gravity world (1.3g) which puts much more strain on the thrusters.

More ships ! That one’s the Dauntless, an Imperial Eagle named for the other Eagle I had (Undaunted). A nice little ship, nippy and packing a punch from the railgun I had in there. But outclassed by pretty much anything else out there. It did better than the replacement :

That’s the Mighty Magpew, which was …. anything but. Odd, because I seem to remember this ship being better for my last character. Could be those headache issues. This one nearly got blown up a couple of times as I ran away very quickly from bigger ships that totally outclassed it.

This one got me back on the right track though. That’s a Diamondback Scout called Day Tripper, which let me learn the new exploration system. Previously, you’d ping the system to find out roughly what was in it and then would have to fly to everything to scan it. Now, you still ping the system but have an analysis system that’s like having a telescope and spectroscope. So instead of guessing whether a planetoid is worth scanning, you get that from the spectroscope now and then check them out further via the telescopes.

It’s so much better. Anyway, that ship earned me almost 19m credits which was a great return on its 3m investment. But I’m on to the next one already :

That’s the … have a look at the next pic. 😀 It’s a Cobra Mk4 that I’m going to use for some more intensive mission running to unlock the Imperial ships. Oh and for fun and profit too.

One plan for this time around is to go up the list of ships available, from cheapest to most expensive, finding a useful purpose for each one. The Cobra 4 is for mission running, I’ll run the first freighter until I go up another Trading level and then it’s a Dolphin totally misused to do planetary landings for prospecting.

I’ve definitely been enjoying back in Elite. It feels like my hands have been agreeing too. I haven’t had the physical issues erupt like they do with Skyrim or WoW.

Oh ! What’s the ship called …

There we go. Zoom in for name. One thing about this picture though, there’s some really daft design in the Elite world. That’s an Outpost, which has all of its landing pads on the outside. Some of them are in really odd positions, with obstructions on the landing pathway. So for this one, you have to come in curved (or from above). Whereas if the landing pad was reversed by 180 degrees, you’d be coming in from the space side instead of the station side.

A small criticism :-D.

I’ve gone back into the internet spaceships !

Also Lego happened. And Thorntons Easter eggs. (Other easter eggs are available too)

More on the Lego in a future post but I would happily recommend the 20th anniversary Pod Racer model. Nice build and a lovely model.

I’ve been thinking about going back into Elite for a while but one thing that has kept me away has been the various new changes that have been introduced since I last played almost a year ago. I’ve been enjoying coming back in, although I have retired a character again. Cmdr Keela Danne has retired to one of those Earth Like planets she found for some serious chilling out while the space ship empire gets handed over to new management.

Enter Cmdr Iceangel (again) as I go back to the name of my first character. The ship up above is the Money Spider, named for the smallest ship in the game, the Sidewinder. These ships are like paper … if a laser goes off in the next star system, this ship will probably explode.

But it’s a nice ship to start in, even if you take off the shields and weapons and pray no one has a go at you.

Oh ! Cmdr Keela retired with 348m credits in assets over 19 ships and …. zero insurance claims. As in, no deaths for that character. And I was occasionally poking things with the lasers, just running away quickly when the damage was getting too great.

Ship 2 is the Undaunted, an Eagle class light fighter ship. I’ve been playing the new new player experience thing that’s … new with the latest patch that arrived on Tuesday. That’s added a few systems that are permit controlled, so only the newest players can jump into them. The intention is that with those safe areas and a nicely beefed up set of help menus, new players can learn the game.

Definitely weird starting off with a ship that’s capable of autodocking and (another new thing) autolaunching. I’ve actually turned those off because I don’t trust them yet. I did a little docking and landing tutorial a while ago (video link). Gosh that’s quiet after watching someone else’s video. Maybe he’s loud. And I hate my voice still. Oh ! I think that may have been video 3 where I messed up by not realising that the nVidia Shadowplay was recording my voice as well as Audacity, hence the bad volume settings.

Anyway ! Eagle. Good ship for fighting and it’s one of 6 that’s available in that starting area. Oh and you’re limited on modules too, with only E and D modules available. Only lasers too. The 6 ships are the starting Sidewinder and then the Eagle, Hauler, Adder, Viper 3 and the ship I’ll leave the zone in, Cobra Mk3. It’s a good selection of ships. (Although the Hauler is still nasty !)

And then there’s the Dragonbug :

A little ship, built for being your starter hauler ship. But it’s slow and only has one laser hardpoint, so I’ll be in an Adder or Viper 3 next time I play.

Oh and the game is still rather pretty :

Criticisms :
The texture work of the asteroid interior is a bit dodgy.
Anti-aliasing has done a number on the yellow guard rails on the walkways.

But it’s a starbase dug into an asteroid. This is awesome ! Elite is definitely one of the prettier games out there and there are stellar sights which look so much better. I do like how the spot light is illuminating and scattering off the dust between it and the spaceship. Also nice reflection off the right hand side of the pad.

Other things from resetting :
Inara.cz has recovered from the save game reset, with a few niggles.
EDSM is very confused and wasn’t updating. Hopefully that fixes before I go out exploring again.
The trade system is so much better now, you can find the best trades from within the game now, instead of having to ask sites like EDDB. It’s still a good idea to ask EDDB for trade routes … but if you’re going from one station to the next running courier missions, this is so much better than it was before.

So yeah ! Back in the pilot seat, enjoying it too. Hopefully my hands hold up to it. My right hand is getting more prone to RSI issues now and didn’t like the Skyrim session that I had on Monday. And other bits of me don’t like the play until eyes close of a Stellaris session.

And it’s so pretty.

One more day and then back to work !

And hopefully back to the normal sleep pattern. Stellaris isn’t good for normal patterns.

What have I been up to …. I was feeling pretty burned out at the start of the break. The way my body works is that I’ll soak up pressure and tiredness up until a certain point … and then probably go beyond that point into areas that get a bit silly.

I’m not talking about opening Stellaris at noon and closing it again at 1 (am). No, this is more like not anticipating conditions (it’s suddenly gone into near summer weather here !), possibly nearing heatstroke and generally hitting the limits of what I think I can do at the moment … and then going beyond.

(The latest is Friday, which I promised someone I wouldn’t talk about too much !)

Friday was a good opportunity to grab the pizza though. Even if that ended up being a still eating at 11pm thing.

That’s another sign of my personal time clock shifting when I’m on leave, or playing Stellaris. I was munching dinner at 11pm again last night, that’s not good for all sorts of reasons. But that’s bad stuff, what about the fun ?

This week’s been about chilling out, to the games, to the music, to catching up on watching stuff. Stellaris has soaked up a lot of time again, with a fella called Quill18 (youtube guy who I watch a little of) going for the 200 years of peace achievement. So I thought I’d see about turning the gameplay back to something simpler and seeing about collecting the achievements. I’m up to 52 now out of 95, with 40 coming in the last couple of weeks. Including that 200 years of peace (it was actually 325).

Fun times, mixed in with a lot of terror when the crisis events happened. The trick to the peace as a pacifist race is being strong enough that no one wants to try and attack, which is harder than it sounds because the AIs in Stellaris can be quite aggressive … in the first attempt at the achievement, AIs were attempting to attack even when their cause was hopeless because they had nowhere else to go.

That’s how that game essentially ended, with my combined fleets taking on the AI Contingency which was attempting to sterilise the galaxy. Oh and it went a little further than that for one of the achievements :

I think that star was a little bit bigger than the Dyson Sphere my people had created to capture its output.
The latest game sees me playing the complete opposite, they’re a bunch of murderbots called the OTHAN Core (Over The Hill Artificial Nexus) with that name reflecting how I was feeling on Saturday after lots of walking on Friday !

We’re on the left there having worked our way through 3 competing races so far. The next war will be against the 4 neighbouring races who have joined up in a federation. The main disadvantage to playing as the Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm or in this case, Determined Exterminator, is that diplomacy is impossible and the other races will gang up in defence … because they’re scared.

Makes for challenging games.

I’ve also enjoyed finishing off the Battletech campaign. A curious game, they brought out the gameplay in the tabletop game but I wasn’t convinced about the scenarios they put it in. It’s like the difference between having a set of rules to play with and having a fun world to play in. I’m not sure that the Roguetech mod allows for that. It greatly expands the rules but doesn’t do much about the world. I may well give it another shot, especially as I’ve given Avast the boot after thinking that it was hurting performance too much.

Lots of music has been happening too as I steadily work my way through the library again. There are less than 4000 tracks to go now until I’ve listened to everything … and along the way more new music will appear. I have my eye on Jade Bird and Emiliana Torrini after hearing a couple of their tracks over the last few days.

I’m up to listening to the G albums now.

I have an episode of Titans on at the moment in another window. An interesting modern take on it, which I’ve been more intrigued about than enjoying perhaps. I’m wondering where it will be going.

I’m up to series 6 with Stargate SG-1, which I have more mixed feelings about. If you watch that after reading the British Stargate fanfic thing, the series is very much a dumpster fire in comparison. O’Neill is a decent character but …. he’s also very often written as a bit of a prat. Stealing technology, the Red Sky episode where he allows impetuousness to override how he deals with the locals. It’s a much loved series but I have reservations about it now.

I’ll keep watching though. It was one of the best series on when it came out but … is probably ageing a bit badly now.

Now though, I think it’s a little bit of Skyrim !

Another meme sighted ! This one is :

You have to pick 7 films for a marathon all-nighter, but the rules are: 1) the films must be franchise films & 2) all 7 films must be from different franchises.

Let’s see. What can we come up with from that one. Oh and you know already that a lot of these are going to be scifi don’t you ? I’m totally ignoring that must be franchise film rule by the way.

First up is the inevitable Star Wars film, it’s Rogue One.

This was an incredible film when it came out with a compelling storyline that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe. The characters really sprung to life and made you feel what they were going through. The visuals were incredible. The digitally resurrected Tarkin was utterly chilling.

Next up is Passengers, a love story set on a space ship in the reasonably distant future. A small cast … but there is great interplay between the two leads. There’s great drama and …. a tear or two were genuinely shed while watching this movie. Oh and you gotta watch the gag reel in the extras especially for Jennifer Lawrence’s incredibly filthy laugh. I suspect she had huge fun with this movie.

Time for a super hero movie and I’m picking Thor Ragnarok. This is one film that definitely didn’t take itself seriously at all. I was head bopping to Led Zep’s Immigrant Song right at the start and there was a bemused grin on my face all the way through watching it at the cinema. Twice.

A film I haven’t watched for ages is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Actually it’s a toss up here between this film and House of Flying Daggers. Crouching Tiger led the way here bringing this genre back to popularity and it was a stunningly beautiful story, cinematography and setting. And House of Flying Daggers continued and extended that.

Is that two picks or one ? I need to watch both again !

Number 5 is 2001 which was an incredible movie in its day. Bit boring perhaps but an absolute triumph for the visuals. The modelling work still looks great today.

Up at 6 is Pacific Rim. Another soft fluffy absolute FUN movie with big silly robots fighting sillier big monsters. This list had to have some daft fun in it and Pacific Rim definitely fits that for a movie I’d happily watch over and over again.

Last one will surprise many and I’d urge you to go see it if you haven’t. It’s the Handmaiden from 2016, a gorgeously shot and played film set in Japan. A nefarious scheme has been hatched to separate a young heiress from her money … But will it go as everyone plans ? This one kept me guessing all the way through and it was a delight to experience it. (Adult warning though – there’s some strong stuff in this one)

Honourable mentions go to the Matrix films. To Interstellar for a story that also got the tears at the end … but it suffered for the silliness that broke it’s scifi. I didn’t think I could add a Star Trek movie but Wrath of Khan, The Motion Picture and Insurrection are definite candidates. I thought Battle Angel Alita was a marvellous film this year, as was Spiderman into the Spiderverse.

I need to watch Studio Ghibli movies too. I loved Spirited Away when I watched it many years ago.

Hmm … any more ? I do have a sizeable dvd/bluray collection. The Riddick movies were excellent scifi.

And then there’s the Resident Evil movies, the Independence Day movies, Mad Max, Die Hards. Armageddon and Deep Impact (and Meteor). The Jurassic Park movies. Yes I’m trolling but you should definitely check out Troll Hunter as it’s a marvelous film too.

And I just looked over at the blurays and instantly spotted The Martian ! How could I leave that one out !

I’m pretty tired at the moment.

Soon. The run from Xmas to Easter always seems really long and that burns me out after a while. What I really should do is find a time around March time to take a week and rest up before More Things happen around Easter. This time around, work took me away on trips away for a day which were great (apart from the meeting day which was meh but had to be done) and I actually felt far more hyper after a couple of those than I have done all year. But that gets to the limit of my energy after a while.

That’s improving though, I think my general health is improving as my outsides improve. Probably due to being able to sleep a bit better recently.

What isn’t helping is multiple threats and worries, within and without. I won’t talk about those here. But they are weighing on my mind a lot.

While I haven’t been reading much lately, I was enjoying Embers of War and I really need to reopen that one. Similar with the drawing. I need to get the pad out again at some point and practice again. Because people seem to like the drawings.

Games have been dominating my downtime lately, both in watching videos of games and in the playing too. Oh and if you have Netflix, check out Love, Death and Robots. I enjoyed the first 6 of these. Well, maybe The Witness was a bit too weird but Three Robots was amazing as was “When The Yogurt Took Over” and Suits.

Let’s see … the Battletech campaign has been continuing with mechs stomping the opposition and the occasional tragedy on our side too.

Iceangel (yep, old name back) leads the company from her Highlander mech called Can Be Only One. Yep. I went there :-D. I have a melee specialist in the For Behemoth ready to get close, thump things and then barbecue what remains. That one was piloted by Quarterback, who was the latest casualty of optimistically trying to stay around when the best choice would be to eject and save the pilot.

You can take 4 mechs along, so the other two are the lighter (still heavy!) mechs of varying roles. Like the long range missile mechs of Storm Of Bees, Fuzzy’s Fireflies and Lurking Doom. There’s a couple of long range gun mechs in Elysian Fire and Rumbling Thunder. The idea is to engage at range while the heaviest mech runs in close to barbecue things. It seems to be working, although the AI doesn’t give you an easy ride and tends to pick on already wounded mechs. I do too, all’s fair in war and all that.

Here’s the fallen so far, including the daftest so far. Most of the pilots have been lost to shots to the head bit. Very lucky shots …

Poor Apex getting mugged on her first mission. I named a mech Apex Predator for that one but it was an ill fated mech too. There are also the Remember Behemoth, Rise Seneschal, I really need one for Medusa and the next big mech to be reclaimed will be something like Quarterback Sneak. The game does a decent job of having you keep an eye on your pilots. Glitch is great with random comments “Will there be bears?” and I actually feel bad about losing some. Medusa too, who returned from massive injuries, to get injured again in his next battle and then eating a head shot in the battle after that.

And then there’s mech names like Prickly Hedgehog and Bunnies. Sometimes the names come ! Sometimes the brain only has bunnies in it.

I also went back into Stellaris for the first time in a while. This was totally without mods to see about getting some achievements collected. The true target was 200 years of peace, which won’t come in this game. The two nearest neighbours keep declaring war, keep getting crushed and ….

My mob are in the south in the light green with a Heart symbol. They’re Fanatic Pacifists, the heart symbol seemed appropriate. The two belligerents are just to the North and North West but the big threat is the blue Swarm guys to the East. They’re a devouring swarm that is just as powerful as my race economically and …. they have an overwhelming fleet advantage. I suspect they will declare war while I’m fighting the two close AIs again and … the best course of action if they do will be to modify my species to make ourselves Delicious (yes, you can do that !) and throw ourselves on to the Swarm’s dinner table.

I have a Cunning Plan to get that 200 years of peace achievement. I’ll roll up a Devouring Swarm, eat everyone and put the game on fast forward for an hour or so.

Sorted.

Yep. Games have been fun again lately. Hopefully I can get my Skyrim game running again soon, as the latest patch did a massive number on all the mods I use. A stable game suddenly became very unstable and the mods wouldn’t link up between themselves. The Cunning Plan there is to delete everything and start again. The deletion happened at the weekend and I’ll put things back on at some point.

On leave next week though. I’m hoping to escape the house for at least a couple of days too ! Stow on the Wold is fairly close by and I remember it being a nice place to visit. It’ll be good to go back.

Be well everyone.

I’m pretty tired as I type this, so sadly no drawings to back it up but there does appear to be a few photographic bits of evidence that have been left in my wake after the latest rampage events.

I’ve had trouble with my insides for a good while. My insides make too much acid and that gets pretty uncomfortable. Especially when attempting to get to sleep.

(Last night was a doozy ! Both me and my mum had the fish at the pub and we were both affected by nasty cases of acid as we discovered this morning)

But. There is much to be said for taking a disadvantage and turning it around to your advantage.

In this case, I’ve been keeping it quiet but for the last few months I’ve been undergoing experimental gene therapy. I had a little foretaste of this after eating the garlic bread at Turtle Beach, burping and I’m sure a little bit of flame came out.

(credit – Ines-ka of Deviantart, see link)

Of my mouth ! Not the other end. That could have been bad.

But yeah ! It sounded like a great idea. Start with that excess hydrochloric acid that’s being made. Add something to liberate all that flammable hydrogen. It also helps if it makes something tasty. Salt is good and one half of that is Sodium. This video has a demonstration involving Aluminium. Sodium is really reactive though (think – explosive in water) so the gene docs had to make a few modifications so that I wouldn’t go the way of pigeons that have been fed baking soda laden bread. (Don’t do that folks)

We thought about Iron too and I do have a taste for Irn-Bru (made in Scotland from girders) but Iron isn’t quite reactive enough for what we wanted.

I’m getting sidetracked.

A few bits of gene modification later, a strengthening of the stomach lining, addition of a second stomach as a reaction chamber and some membranes behind my front teeth as igniters too and …

I breathe fire now. How cool is that !

Bit of a drawback when trying to put out the candles though. One of the Double D boys has a birthday today ! Happy birthday !

Picture credit – ZookieDragon of Deviantart again.

It’s great for the cooking too.

Maybe.

That totally wasn’t a horrible accident that happened during experimentation. Honest.

 I picked up more marshmallows too this weekend ! Totally looking forward to trying out the new abilities on those. It’s also a good way of disposing of the junkmail we all get too. Smoke alarm doesn’t like it but … smoke alarms are a bit rubbish anyway.

Totally.

One thing I’m not looking forward to are the cramps they warned me about. My metabolism was always a bit odd when it came to cramping and dehydration and salt balance. I’d like salt bomb myself into cramping by having too much salt on my dinner after running around. And that Sodium Chloride waste product from the hydrogen production could well lead to muscles that want to go bang.

I guess that just means lots of water or. Come to think of it …. Something more flammable to increase the flame effect !

YES. DEFINITELY.

I had nothing to do with that. Honest.