Hello again everyone,
I have been trying to post more often, honest :-D. I’ve even got things lined up that I could post for internet spaceships, other games and … more Lego now too. I left the last post on Monday last week saying that it got a bit too hot … And yep, it was toasty through to Wednesday and has calmed down since then. Thursday saw me hopping out to the place in today’s thumbnail pic :
Thursday saw me heading out to Bristol. I was feeling the Lego shops calling, plus I wanted to check out the more local Antics model shop and the heat was making me have an urge for a Frostino thing to freeze my brain. Frostino was acquired and I even went back to the Lego shop after an earlier first look. It was either Cardiff or Bristol for the trip and I didn’t fancy fighting my way in and out of Cardiff. The roads aren’t the best. Oh and I also found myself going up the motorway a bit to the farm shop services place. It was good to stretch the legs.
Needed some air too, I must check out some of the local castles. A friend takes her gorgeous dog Henry on outings to the castles and treats us with great piccys.
Anyway, Antics was a bust. The shop in Bristol is about the same size as the Cardiff one and the people in the Cardiff one were better. If you’re going to be rude about the people who work in the shops next door, wait until the single customer in the shop can’t hear you. And there were other issues there. But I did have something catch my ear in HMV and therefore several cds escaped with me. The one playing in the store was Garbage’s latest and Jean-Michel Jarre’s Planet Jarre caught my eye, as did a Madness collection. Oh and I’ve since been able to download the Elite Odyssey soundtrack, so I’ve been listening to that too.
Before I get on to the main event for today, internet spaceships have happened …
The idea I had last week for doing Empire missions didn’t work out, which meant swapping to a new place. Tiamat’s Chariot is too big for that, so it meant the arrival of Milo’s Messenger, callsign -NANO-. It’s named for Kim Nanosounds and I got the idea for a name theme while one of her streams was on in the background. It’s a nippy ship too. This was my first landing at a planet that has the thin atmospheres that also allow landing. We can’t land on thick atmosphere worlds yet but seeing horizons like that in the game now since the Odyssey expansion is going to be a treat to look out for when I do exploring again.
There was a decent amount of internet spaceship but the evenings since that Thursday have partly been about …
Spot the elastic bands … This is the centre column of the latest acquisition from the Lego shop. It’s the start of quite a smart mechanism that snicks around pretty well.
The mechanism is mostly together there, with it being captured within the central frame. There’s a couple of level arms up at the top there as well in green and yellow, these activate the mechanism.
One internal clever thing about this one was use of colour to denote which side of the model you would be attaching pieces to. One side has red bits, the other side has green bits.
There we go. You must be able to tell what this is building into … Here we have the standing position, with the centre leg retracted into the casing.
As you move the side legs backwards, the mechanism releases the foot.
This got described in one place as the mount of a Kobold Artificer, a Kobold mech rider and a Kobold Mechapod by me later. There are a couple of hidden compartments on there as well.
There we go. Last little bit of the model coming there. There are a couple of compartments here as well, like the periscope thing R2 has and a hole for a mini lightsaber.
There we go, all done. The head rotates freely as well there. A good model, fantastic level of finish although it is fairly expensive. The parts count is pretty high at 2,314 pieces, although a lot of these are single block or finishing block items. The model itself is relatively small, although that was actually a draw because it means less space required to keep it !
There we go. I had to bring out the BB-8 as well for the last shot.
Good model, it’s been pretty relaxing over the weekend … and then the Mars Horizon took over for the last few evenings. They’ve released a new update that includes a new Iron Core mode (gotta accept bad results, can’t reload to erase them), the Falcon 9 reusable rocket and a version of the Perseverance Mars lander and helicopter system. It’s a good little update to a game I’ve massively enjoyed.
Work’s been good too this week, it was fun to see the thing I’d delayed my leave for turn up in the local newsletters. It was a good day that and a very satisfying trial. There were problems, there always are (and you learn more from problems than if everything whooshes straight through) but our kit was all good and working.
Plus it was another day or so away from the working at home thing.
More post at the weekend hopefully ! I’ve had those thoughts of “I have things I could write a post about” but then post doesn’t happen. Must break out of that.
Oh and I’m double vaccinated now by the way. I’m concerned about the uptick in numbers in the UK and especially concerned that there has been no reaction to control that uptick. But you can only do those actions that you control which are things like : keep an eye out for idiots, wear the mask and avoid being in situations your risk of plague is high.
Stay safe everyone, be well.
