Month: February 2022

Boats, Worry, Wind, Break, Monster

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February 27, 2022

8:50 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been a bit quiet – it’s a worrying time at the moment. I’ve been on a break from work this week, I usually struggle to go straight through from Xmas to Easter without a little time off and this week felt convenient. Especially with a boat show on at the NEC last weekend. I figured I could go on the Friday …

Picture. We're looking at a rain soaked tarmac path going directly ahead of us. Either side is a drenched grassy area with occasional trees.
Bit nautical …

However … Worry part 1 was the big storms that happened last weekend. I’d originally planned to go to see boats on the Friday and I’d have been travelling at Peak Storm Time. So I chose life and went on Saturday instead. It was a good day out. I didn’t see much damage from wind to be honest, although the worst of it was to the South West of where I am and I was heading North. One of the Severn Bridge crossings was closed again though and I suspect that Avonmouth Bridge would have been pretty nasty too. I left the motorway early again on the way back, the last little bit is pretty exposed and can catch the wind. Boats ?

Picture. We're looking at a black and dark blue barge from its left hand side. There is a queue of people waiting to go on there. The entrance is at the back, with a set of stairs going up to a canvas roof.
It’s a big one

It’s a big one isn’t it ? That’s a widebeam barge, I think it was a 72ft boat. Note the flat bottom. This one is a river cruising widebeam barge suitable for living on. The inside looked nice but to be honest, I really dislike that colour combination. I had a walk through a narrowbeam barge as well, it was really cramped.

Picture. We're looking into a narrowbeam barge. There is red painted wood forming the door and roof above. The wood inside is pale pine type wood. Inside the boat there is a cooker to the left and a sink to the right. Two people give a sense of scale. The gap between the two worktops is about the size of one person.
A tight fit ?

I don’t think I could live on that. It was very cramped. There are narrower barges than others though. That seemed extraordinarily tight … Of the two though, I liked the colour of the narrowbeam with the red setting off its green pretty well. I didn’t like the colour of the dark blue one. That didn’t work for me. What colour would I want on a barge ? I think a green shade with wooden trim. That would work well. There’s something about a rich well varnished shiny wood finish. White is a good colour for them as well but I’d be wary about how grimy those would get.

Picture. We're looking at a small wooden motorboat on top of a stand. It has a small cuddly bear in the pilot area. He's wearing goggles and a flying hat.
Bear ! On a boat !

I hope he packed his essentials.

It was good heading out to see the boats. A decent amount to see, although I’d exhausted it fairly quickly (About 3/4 of a Hall of the NEC) and the homing signal was kicking in again to get me away from that amount of People.

The wind came back on the Sunday and I think it may actually have been worse than on the Friday. I spent most of my Friday afternoon being another person watching the Big Jet TV guy. That was good. And scary at the same time as the wind was demonstrating its power over our feeble constructions that we send into the skies. It reminded me of what was happening when I was coming back from Canada, where I think my plane had to do a crabbed landing. There was definite sense of the plane having to do that reorientation to straight as it landed.

I could actually try flying planes again … I’ve signed up for Game Pass. Mostly for Forza Horizon 5 …

Game screenshot. Forza Horizon 5. We're looking down a road that's gently curving to the left. Our car is a silver sports car, there is a black sports car a little up the road. One the right is a desert type landscape dotted heavily with greenery. A huge dust storm threatens at the horizon.
Do you feel the need for speed ?

Well. Maybe not Need For Speed, although I did enjoy playing Need For Speed 3 Hot Pursuit in its 1998 incarnation. That was a very fun arcade driving game. It was early days in Forza H 5 for me but it was gratifying when it suggested Extreme (pretty) graphics settings for me and great when the system had good frame rates with that. I should go back to it. I’m playing on a cheap controller which might actually hit that “cheap is more expensive” thing because I’m either going to take it apart to modify or replace it already with something better.

How come ? It’s a console style controller with the analogue sticks, with the value of 100% coming at maybe 50% of travel. That’s making the driving particularly difficult. Forza was well behaved but the Automation cars weren’t … Talking of that,

Game screenshot. BeamNG Drive. We're looking at a monster truck parked on top of a slightly banked concrete area. It's green with big black wheels. The front grille is triangles facing each other like teeth. It has two spotlights in front of the cab like eyes and red triangles attempting to look like spines.
Gets you anywhere, if you can climb in

Conedodger’s Automation build off challenge this week was Monster Trucks. It was the first I’ve joined in on and that truck above is the result of 11 hours in Automation and about 3 hours in BeamNG.Drive. (Automation is an early access game that lets you build custom cars, BeamNG Drive imports what you make and lets you drive them in a full physics simulation). People seemed to like what I’d put together and Mr Cone seemed to enjoy driving it round the Monster Truck arena built to test them all out. Not the best, not the worst. Happy with how it came out. It drove well around the test track above but it (and the other trucks) tended to explode when landing on jumps. It made for a hilarious stream. And then there’s Truckball (twitch clip link)

I think I need to hit post now though (and my shoulder is approaching pain point). I do intend to post more often. Bit worried about the world at the moment and it’s affecting the want to share anything at the moment.

One thing I have noticed though – since changing job my mental state seems to be recovering to the point where the daft creative ideas are coming out again. Which is really good. I’m looking forwards to being more involved again going forwards. But enough about work :-D. I’d like to get back to the drawing again. It was good creating a couple of memes for the Tashnarr/Sheepy 40k layers miniature painting show which had a special episode with KatiePetersPlays on Friday. People seemed to love them but I think it used up all my brain wanted to give on Friday. (Not posting them here, ask if wanting to see them)

Time to hit post. Stay safe everyone, be well, hopefully the world sorts itself out soon.

A little music ?

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February 16, 2022

11:44 pm

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What’s this ? Two posts in a week ? There might be more at the weekend if we’re not all blown away by storms by then :-D.

I think my back has started to improve, add that to my mental state improving at work again in the new post and I’ve been a bit bouncier letting the daft thoughts come out and have fun. Haven’t been banned from anywhere yet, so there’s still a bit of control there :-D. I’ve been enjoying listening to a few bits of music again and I’m way overdue a music post. This one’s going to be fairly random … But first, a thumbnail !

Picture. A very forlorn looking orange dragon is on a stage with a microphone in front of them. The microphone appears to be on fire ...
Don’t be shy singer dwagon

Attribution on this one is to Tooshtoosh from a site that’s pretty hostile with its cookie popup thing but here’s a link anyway. Oh, the music thing is also inspired a bit by the ever lovely streamer lady Tashnarr (twitch link) who treated us to a rendition of Still Alive, the song at the end of the Portal game.

There’s been some amazing tunes on the iTunes DJ* selection as well this evening. It’s come time again to listen to the best tracks of Madonna’s Ray of Light album, currently listening to Frozen but I don’t think that’s actually the best on the album. Let’s see … It starts off remarkably well with Drowned World / Substitute For Love and keeps on going throughout. Perhaps my favourite Madonna album. And I can mostly sing along to it which is always good.

The album before was Aventine by Agnes Obel, who has a fairly distinct sound and a great voice as the centrepiece of it. Here’s what I think is the best track from it, The Curse. I do like it when the instruments interact with the voice, with the instruments feeling as important a part of the melody as the voice.

Another group that did that extremely well was Dire Straits, with Mark Knopfler weaving voice and guitar together. Here’s their interpretation of a modern Romeo and Juliet.

Thinking of Portal and Staying Alive, I think Lisa Miskovsky did a song called Staying Alive for the original Mirror’s Edge game (not played it or heard the track). This is another lady with a remarkable voice, although the songs might end up sounding a bit bland and over produced. When she’s good though, it’s a A Brand New Day of very very good.

All song links go to youtube as per usual.

Katie Peters Plays (another wonderful lady streamer) added in a Stress-Less-Zone for her discord not long ago and while listening to Clannad’s Legend album, I thought a few of the tracks in there could be a good fit for it. Legend was an album that came out accompanying the 1980s Robin of Sherwood series and was essentially a soundtrack album for it. The Clannad music set a wonderful tone for the series and Together We was one of the signature tracks.

The next album up here is the ‘Til We Meet Again album by Norah Jones, which is a bit of a collection of previous work. My favourite track on there is After The Fall, which came from the Little Broken Hearts album.

Going back a bit, I remembered All About Eve for someone the other day. This is one from way back, one of the first albums on cd we owned. Martha’s Harbour was a fantastic introduction for this group and that voice. Oh and I love how she disappears off into the background and lets the band take centre stage for the instrumental section of another of my favourites, Blue Sonic Boy.

I’ve picked up a few albums lately, I thought Invisible String by the prolific Taylor Swift was pretty good. There was another album by Metric too but I’d go back to Gold Guns Girls as a particular highlight from them. They got energy.

Time for a few other favourites ? I mentioned instruments being as much a part of the song as the voice and Congregation by Low caught me like that too. It was chosen as music for the series Devs for a few episodes. Didn’t bother finishing the series, did like the song.

The Awake And Always Dreaming album by Hannah Peel came up as well, she started out with a wonderful music box accompanying her singing but she didn’t want to continue doing semi traditional song arrangements and moved on to a more classical style. Lovely voice, good one to listen to. And you have to respect the choice of moving on to a different style. Here’s Don’t Kiss The Broken One. Oh and apparently Song For The Sea, The Almond Tree and Unwound on that link too.

I was looking forward to another little lady singer (name like shoes) who’s giving us another album soon but she’s gone into NFTs so nope. Seeya.

I don’t want to leave this post on a downer though … oh ! Here’s an appropriate one for people who publicise and promote the NFT thing. Rocket by Goldfrapp. You’ll know why when you hear the words :-D. Oh and that’s an underrated album too, it’s another one that maintains energy throughout.

Part of this is from pondering if I go back to selecting albums to listen to in the car on Friday. I’ve been lazy for the last few years and just letting it do its semi random selection. But it would be good to listen to some of those great albums in the car again. Kate Bush did some wonderful albums where the tracks blended in to each other, Pink Floyd would tell a story with their albums too. Wish You Were Here ? I think it’ll be on the flat on Friday and no Running Up That Hill.

One last song before I disappear off to pay more attention to Tashnarr’s stream …

I bought a Game Pass subscription yesterday with the aim of trying out Forza Horizon 5. I enjoyed a couple of hours in that yesterday although apparently my cheap and (not) cheerful controller gives 100% of signal after only 50% of travel on the analogue pad so driving is challenging. Looks awesome though :

Game screenshot. Forza Horizon 5. We're in the middle of a sandstorm, so everything is light orange and sandy. In the centre, coming towards camera is a small jeep, apparently speeding along past a broken statue in the background. There are sparse trees dotted around the landscape.
Zoom through the storm

I did enjoy a few hours in that yesterday. And it was good that it recommended Extreme graphics settings and was actually able to give a good frame rate with that.

To the music ? Last one. And it’s the old theme for the Grand Prix coverage on BBC. It’s The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. (edit – redid the link)

Later everyone ! Stay safe, be well, don’t get blown away by the storm.

Back, Boat, Controller, Drive, Meme

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February 14, 2022

10:16 pm

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Hello everyone,

I had a bit of a blur of a weekend which followed something daft that happened on Thursday. Let’s just say I had a daft idea and the means to make it happen.

Picture. A short green pocket dragon is standing in the middle of a 5 pointed pentagram star made of Smarties sweets of varying colours. The dragon wears a bib with "Feed Me" on it. The scene is lit with a white pen light, with ominous shadows ...
That’ll do it

People seemed to like that one, it didn’t take much time for me to make it happen. I think the juggle of phone camera and my pen torch light helped add a little spooky. (Timers are super handy for when you need a hand to hold the phone and a finger to press the picture button). Oh and I like Smarties too. It’s drawn a few lovely reactions which made my day when I saw them. I get the ideas in my head for pictures like that and it feels good when I can make them happen.

And then I hurt my back on Friday afternoon and that was Brain in a cloud of subconscious pain for the weekend. That’s a weird Me thing apparently. I wasn’t getting much actual pain from my back, so I must have just come short of seriously hurting it. But I could feel something pretty Wrong back there and I was getting the warnings. It’s like my subconscious could feel the issues from it and natural painkilling was stopping me from properly feeling it. But it was clouding my thinking.

It’s started to improve today, which is good. Plus my mental state at work is far better than it was last year. Mental state is pretty critical to the rest of your well being. (But I’m sure everyone knows that !) Mine goes up and down, I’m completely driven by confidence and that feels like it’s got some rungs to climb back up on.

Oh and boat show on Friday. That should be good. I just have to get myself over to it. Pictures will most definitely happen. The Brain Fog over the weekend led to me retreating into the shell a little bit, although I have finished off The Expanse series and the Space 1999 Technical manual. I did try something new though … How it started :

Game screenshot. Automation. We see two cars on a coppery sea side scene with flat rock among puddles. The nearer car is a small modern red convertible with a slot grille. Behind is is a dark blue classic car convertible with more curves and round headlights.
Party on the beach ?

Those come from the in development game, Automation. It’s a car building game where you can get in to pretty detailed and well modeled parameters for the engines, gearboxes, chassis and suspension layouts. And on top, you can fiddle with the body options with a huge range of basic shells to work with which you add the features like headlights, mirrors, vents and door handles to. Anyway, that’s my first couple of cars. It made them pretty.

It has a companion simulator application called BeamNG.Drive, which lets you transfer over the cars from Automation so you can drive them around. Because what could make looking at a pretty car better than actually driving the car around and it has a number of tracks to test out your cars on, with the parameters that you designed into them. The two cars in the picture are pretty modest affairs though. The blue one is modeled on the old Triumph Spitfire Mk3, which was a 1960s era cheap sports car. The car started with an 1147cc engine and the Mk3 has a 1.3 litre engine. Small … but these cars were tiny without the modern features that add to the weight, so they were still quite sprightly. (The Spitfire competed with the Austin Sprite too).

The red one is a more modern interpretation, still a 1.3 litre but with a turbo attached for more power and other features included like fuel injection over the dual carburettors of the old Spitfire. Oh and a sensible suspension set up because I added in an interpretation of the rather dangerous rear suspension of the Spitfire.

This is probably the time for the “How it finished” …

Game screenshot. BeamNG Drive. We see the blue car from before. We're looking at its front left quarter with it straddling the kerb on the inside of a bend. The front right corner is showing major damage.
Oops

Oh well. That’s from one of my early attempts at driving in BeamNG Drive. I’m using a controller because setting up the steering wheel takes a bit of an effort and I need to clean some of the built up Stuff on my desk in order to accommodate it. I needed to tame the controller a bit too, plus it’s about 10 years since I tried to drive with a controller and I had a concussion at the time :-D.

It was curious though, the game/app drove pretty much how I expected at lower speeds … and then bit back pretty nastily at over 100mph. I haven’t driven over 100mph in real life, (stick to 70mph yes guvnor honest) so I don’t have a valid comparison. But I think about it and without any aerodynamic devices like spoilers, splitters or diffusers, the car body will start to act like a lifting body with enough speed which means … unstable. And crashes.

I quite enjoyed that little look at driving games again and was starting to get the hang of it again after a few attempts at doing laps. I’ve been looking at Game Pass and Forza Horizon. I’d quite like to try getting into driving games again, they were fun.

I mentioned book !

The Expanse is finished, long live the Expanse. I still need to watch series 6 but I saw the books through to the end at the weekend. I’m not going to say anything about the content or storyline except that they end it well. There’s a satisfying conclusion and the last page gave a “YEY that’s a great way to finish it”. Which is about all you can ask from a series of this type. Let it tell its story … and then finish on its own terms. That’s how it should be. I was a big fan of the Honorverse series, which I gather were supposed to end at a Point … but they lost their way badly after they continued after that particular point.

It was similar with Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War series, those ended well too. I’d recommend giving those books a read. I’ll reread both the Embers of War series and The Expanse series at some point, which is perhaps the best recommendation you can give a series of books.

I’ve also finished reading the Space 1999 Technical Manual too. I have to say the writing in the technical manual was far superior to the writing in the series. If you were to use it as source material for a role playing game, it would be top notch. The Moonbase Alpha setting was very well visualised and set up, it and the characters deserved better stories.

Next up is Mutineer’s Moon, which is another series re-read. Except in this case, I only re-read the first two books and don’t bother with the third.

Have you read any great books lately ? See you around, stay safe, be well, don’t be a lunatic in the car.

Browser, Moon, Horizon, Film

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February 6, 2022

8:51 pm

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Hello everyone,

Missed posting again ! I must post more regularly again. At least I’m able to post on the main browser again. I’ll get to that in a bit. But first … Been checking out a sale acquired game. It’s pretty.

Game screenshot. Horizon Zero Dawn. Our heroine is standing on a hill, looking towards the lower left. Behind her is a fog filled valley with a scattering of thin, tall trees plus a couple of wooden tower buildings. In the background, there are mountains. Our character Aloy, is in the foreground. She has braided ginger hair and is an athletic built lady wearing light leather garb and boots.
Hey ! Horizon’s over there

The game is Horizon Zero Dawn and while it came out on console in 2017, it came to PC in 2020. It’s pretty demanding on the graphics too, so I had my eye on it partly from acquiring something super pretty to see what the graphics card could do but also because it’s got a renowned story. It’s one of the best games of its type in the 2010s. The graphics do help there but graphics aren’t everything. Where it really scores is the story, the world they’ve built and how that fits into the story and just how everything in the game works. I’m in the early days so far but something I was really enjoying was even just how the foliage reacts to your presence.

Game screenshot. Horizon Zero Dawn. We're looking out towards a grassy area sloping up to the left. On the left, there are a series of light orange coloured rocks. We can just see Aloy's head lurking in a patch of long grass with red leaves, at the bottom of the shot. In the distance are the tall thin trees and we can see a two legged mechanical beastie a little way down the road.
The Whistle Bush Awaits

So without giving too much away, we’re in an environment that feels a lot like Earth but there are no buildings or signs of our current civilisation. At least that we can see on the surface. Our heroine, Aloy, starts off as a child in the care of a fellow called Rost. They’re both outcasts for (redacted story reasons) and the child phase gives a chance for the game to pass on a few of its gameplay systems. There’s one there up on screen, where there are a series of faint purple triangles that show where the robot’s going to go.

Yep. Game has robots. They start small, resembling predator animals but they’ll get a tad bigger too as the game goes on.

I’m not too far in to the game, I’m barely past the prologue. But I have been taken by what they’ve built here. The terrain feels crafted, in a way that procedural generation cannot do. Even Skyrim, which is a crafted world too, shows signs where they’ve been needing to cheat with terrain textures that repeat in a pattern you can easily see. I haven’t seen that so much in Horizon Zero Dawn, it feels very real. Oh and that foliage will move with you as you pass through it. It’s a stealth action game, so hiding in those red leafed bushes can let you entice over an unsuspecting enemy or mechanical beastie so you can quietly stab them with the big spear.

Game screenshot. Horizon Zero Dawn. Aloy sits with back to camera at the bottom left. On the right is a platform made of wooden logs tied together. There are three slim ladies in assorted tan leather garb standing on the platform. One is arching her self backwards with both hands in the air. The platform is in front of a building built from more wooden logs.
Party time !

I was really enjoying this little celebration, with the three ladies on the stage there singing away in something traditional. These are the Nora and they call their warriors Braves, so you can probably guess that the world borrows a lot from Native American culture. And I was loving it in the bits of the game I’ve gotten to so far. The animation of the world is top notch. From the foliage, to the people having a little dance, to the main character reacting to your inputs.

I should say though that I’m running this gorgeous game on a Ryzen 5 3600 machine with 32GB and through a 3060Ti graphics card. That’s Meltdown and it’s turned into a machine that can handle everything it gets given now. It’s a pretty powerful machine, especially in these days of not being able to get hardware due to the shortages that are going on. I was very lucky to get the 3060Ti card when I did, it was literally an offer available for 10 minutes before they were all gone.

Other stuff ? I was actually in work again a couple of times … Once was to rescue the stuff from the locker. The second was to meet the team I’ve been in for a few months now. They’re a good bunch. As per tradition for here, I’m not going to be mentioning the work too much though.

Browser – I’m typing this on a new browser, having had to change because the Waterfox classic was getting too annoying and limited. So I’m on the better Waterfox now that is actually supported. It got to the point where Classic wasn’t allowing me to edit here, didn’t support Netflix, was critically slow in Twitter … etc.

Thursday’s work at work day also gave the excuse to head over to the Mall after, so of course cd’s happened. They’re : Morcheeba’s Blackest Blue, Taylor Swift’s Folklore and a double concert cd from Jean-Michel Jarre.

I’ve also picked up albums from Metric, check out Gold Guns Girls. They got Energy. I’m way overdue a music post so that’s going to happen at some point too. Need to get the Ting Tings latest too, I’m missing an album that they only released on a limited circulation for some reason. The Ting Tings have Energy too.

Game screenshot. Horizon Zero Dawn. It's dark and we're looking up at the sky from boot level on our heroine, Aloy. She's looking off to the right of shot. We can see the top of a broad branched tree to the left. Left half of the sky is cloudy, with a full moon. Right side is clear and we can see the stars. Everything is a tint of green.
Horizon Zero Moon ?

Yep. Game is pretty. I watched another film on Friday at my favoured (empty) local cinema. It was Moonfall. What can I say about Moonfall ? The visuals are done incredibly well. As in, stunning, epic cinematography. The story though … oh dear. Ouch. It’s so bad, it’s actually pretty bad.

The premise is that people on Earth have suddenly discovered that the Moon is dropping out of orbit, with dire consequences for everyone on Earth. There’s not much science in its fiction, which is most of the problem with the movie. There’s a lot of set pieces stitched together with the barest minimum of science to back them up.

I still somewhat enjoyed watching it … but the story is mockbuster quality with top standard visual effects.

One comment on it though – it’s got me wondering about doing a re-read of David Weber’s Dahak series of books. It felt like one of the core premises of Moonfall may have been inspired by what goes on in Mutineer’s Moon and the Armageddon Inheritance in that the Moon may not actually be a big ball of rock …

Anyone else feel like time is zipping along at the moment ? Like you realise that several days have whooshed by without you really registering them ? I have that. I think that’s one contributor to me not posting so much here lately. I need to get some build pics transferring from the phone camera into the PCs so I can post those. Oh and music posts, I’ve still been steadily picking up new stuff.

I think that’s it for me now though. 2 streams on, music on and Olympics to enjoy at some point. And more reading, I’ve been away from the Expanse finale for a little while now.

Stay safe everyone, be well.