Month: October 2023

Where would you be in a science fiction universe ?

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October 23, 2023

9:44 pm

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musing

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Hello everyone,

Yep. Odd thought, it got into my head last night when I was trying to get to sleep. I don’t think I did actually sleep last night, hopefully better today. I suspect it’s been showing in what I’ve been saying about certain groups at work. Like the one who’s head should be on a pike in front of the offices (there’s a few of those) and I was saying I wanted to burn some people’s houses down last week.

Still kinda feel like that. Maybe I need another break again, burn out can creep up on people without them realising and it leads to being intolerant where you should be more ready to retreat, reset and try again from a different angle.

Picture. We're looking at the face of a brown and white cat. It's looking directly at the camera, resting on a blanket. The caption is "I let my mind wander. It never came back"

Quite. Where did the last fortnight go ? Feels like it’s gone by in an absolute blur. A couple of books have been demolished since then too, with Illuminations by T.Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon, Hugo Winner) being a highlight. Maybe not as good as the two Clocktaur War books but those were for a more adult audience and could be a lot edgier, grittier and had a definite sexual tension running through both books.

Good stories too. T Kingfisher books are very inventive in how they keep the story unfolding before you and they surprise you too. Great books can tell their story in the perfect time. They’re not too short, not too padded or drawn out. They’re just right. And that’s how I’ve found the T Kingfisher books … and a little mention for Aliette de Bodard there too.

I didn’t think so much with Wool, the first book in the Silo trilogy. It felt padded and a bit too drawn out. The one I’m reading at the moment is book 6 in a series of 9 by James David Victor. They’re good … but they’re also so fast that I’m reading them 2 at a time.

Science fiction universe ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, with occasional stars dotting the background. In the bottom right foreground, we're looking at a red and white blocky spaceship flying away from us with two engines flaring purple exhaust. A ball like space station is in the distance, with white and black sections. Solar panels can be seen behind.
Dungeon Food Truck, departing

That’s the Dungeon Food Truck, callsign KN-00T after the lovely Knightenator (Twitch link). I don’t watch enough Knightenator, it can be a bit much sometimes for my brain, bit too much anarchy. Lovely lady though, well worth a watch and I couldn’t resist the meme this time with this particular ship. It’s a Type 9 Freighter Explorer, with the prime mission being to go out among the stars …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a reddish brown plain, with several sharp mountains behind, casting their shadows. To the upper right, we see the black, grey and white rings of the planet we are on. Above and behind, we see a small globe of a planet in eclipse shadow, with a set of rings surrounding it.

I was in pretty much full on Travel Mode (Honk, Scoop, Jump, Repeat sometimes scan the good systems) with a mission. Yep. Get to a far flung station …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be faintly seen lower centre, lost in shadow. On the left, the circular shape of a space station with the lit up rectangular docking entrance in the middle. On the right, a white moon pockmarked with small craters. Behind that, a faint blue planet with the line of a planetary ring.

I’ll come back to the mission later.

That question though, if you found yourself in a science fiction universe, what would you want it to be ? We can draw on any of the settings, either our universe or something different. Near future or far off ?

The Star Wars universe is an obvious setting to look at. There’s so much variety here and it’s absolutely full of life. This is a good choice as well, I could see myself being a Han Solo type, with a spaceship traveling between the planets being led by the next big score. Or getting by with simpler cargoes to pay the bills.

Elite Dangerous has a similar spread of life throughout its little populated bubble of stars. It doesn’t have the variety of Star Wars though, with just humans and badly handled Thargoids who won’t be buying you a drink in a bar.

Star Trek is the other huge one, with it close(ish) future of warp drives, impossible science and more great variety of alien life. Star Trek would be a great universe to live in, although it does seem a little limited for starfarers outside the Federation and other Empires. The ships seem a bit big for independent traders, compared to the little ships of Elite and Star Wars.

And then there’s Warhammer 40,000 … Oh my. In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, you’ll be dead before you hit the “May …” of the “May you live in Interesting Times” curse. It’s a bit too much of a stratified society for me, with very few people having any chance of an independent life.

It hasn’t really worked out that way for me (been held back by the health issues of the last 10 years and generalised inertia) but if I could be a ship captain visiting a different port with different cargo every run, yeah I’d quite like that. And the Elite and Star Wars universes both appeal to that with opportunities for the small traders. But you have to stay ahead of the criminal element.

Fun times.

Not so sure about the near future Earth universes. I think we’re exhausting what this planet has to offer, I’d rather be out in the stars seeing new things. I should book one of those cruise holidays though, so I can see a bit more of this planet.

(Back to reality) That’s one thing that has gone whoosh – a bit of a break out with my outsides with the usual thing of quick damage being slow to repair. But it’s getting there. Although I’ve had to add Lemon Sherbets to the suspicion list. Bad snacks. But I wouldn’t want to go away for that long without being able to use the healing gunk.

(Back to unreality) I do like playing in the near future universe of Deus Ex, although that might be more character than setting. Must go back to the Mankind Divided game soon. I don’t think I want to live in that world though, doesn’t seem that much future in it.

Big honourable mention to the Gareth L Powell universes too. He’s very inventive with his world building and can establish his worlds very quickly with the tight narrative. Another recent read was Descendant Machine, which is set in the Continuance series (2 so far hopefully more coming) where humanity has been banished from the Earth for being naughty with nukes. I’ve enjoyed both Descendant Machine and Stars And Bones. Without giving too much of the building away, humanity now lives on starship Arks, with smaller Vanguard scout ships investigating the space they go through. I’d see me being a Vanguard agent.

Yep. Put me in a spaceship and let me chart my own course and I’ll be happy. Journeying is better with a crew though.

Oh ! Here we are …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, our white and red spaceship is to the bottom left. We can just see part of a planet coloured white with thin dark bads. A couple of small interstellar clouds are to top left and between those, we see the lights of our fleet carrier emerging from a black cloud.

(That’s a little bit enhanced, the original was very poorly lit and Gimp has very effectively balanced it there)

That was journey’s end yesterday, with me meeting up with the fleet carrier for the first time in months.

Mission accomplished, carrier crew needed a consignment of Party Rings. (So good). Also needed to bring carrier fuel. But it was mostly about the Party Rings.

Time to post and enjoy more of a Tashnarr stream (Twitchy link). Have a good evening everyone, find snack, enjoy snack, be happy.

New Things Lead To Happy Thoughts

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October 11, 2023

8:38 pm

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technology

Hello everyone,

What’s this ? Two posts in a couple of days ? I’m ok, honest. Well, mostly but I’ll get back to that later.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a cute grey and white kitten, sitting upright. Their back leg is in a long plaster cast. The caption is "My plan to dominate the world has been put on hold for *now*"

The widget I ordered yesterday arrived and it didn’t take too long (and one lost screw, I had a spare) to transfer my recent buy of a 2TB SSD from its USB enclosure into the widget that’ll see it living inside the case with a much better interface. The old performance numbers are in the last post (haha, that’s me shamelessly digging for an extra click for yesterday’s post!) and I’m happy to see a few orders of magnitude increase in performance. Numbers ?

Picture. We're looking at a series of benchmark numbers again for a solid state hard disc. More coming in the text.
Set speed to Zoom

So, looking at the numbers and comparing to last time …

Sequential read rates have gone up from the 40MB/s (megabyte per second) hard limit of the USB cable to 2765MB/s on reads and 4345MB/s on writes. That’s much closer to the theoretical performance of the drive, so I’m happy there.

The Randoms haven’t seen as similarly dramatic an improvement but I’m still very happy with 17 and 20 going up to 53 and 170. That’s still a significant improvement.

The Input/Output Operations Per Second have gone up from 4258 and 4913 to a massively impressive 13495 and 41717. That means it can zap backwards and forwards to find the right data before you’ve realised that the system has gone to the drive to acquire it.

The microsecond timer was good already at 234 and 203 latencys and is up an order of magnitude to 23 on the second number (74 on the first). So compare that to the conventional hard disc and it shows that the old system belongs in the last century.

The conclusion I take is that while you wouldn’t get the full performance out of the drive, putting an SSD into a USB enclosure is a perfectly acceptable way of adding a lot of space to a PC gasping for room. I was (mostly) happily running Starfield off the SSD-ina-box and Starfield will be notorious for demanding an SSD and not an older hard disc.

Jargon busty time … The newer solid state device drives are pretty much just memory chips, of the type that hold their state when the power is taken off. They’re ultra fast. The older ones are :

Picture. Technology. We're looking at the rectangular shape of an old style hard disc. There's a circular platter in the centre, with an arm reaching over. The "head" is on the end of the arm. The connectors are on the bottom.

The data is stored on a cylinder of round platters, which have coatings on top that are sensitive to the magnets in the end of the head. The head is on the end of an arm that will move to allow the head access to the full width of the discs. The thing is called a disc drive because the platters are shaped like discs. They’re spun up to usually 5400 revs per minute with faster ones going at 7200 revs per minute. The more revs, the faster the drive can get to the data and the quicker it can pull the data off the drive.

They were fantastic for the early days of computing but … there are a lot of drawbacks to this technology. Earlier drives would suffer from crashes, where the arm and head could contact the platter. That would dig a trench and pretty much wreck the drive. It didn’t happen too much though after the drives would park the head somewhere off the platters when the drive was powered down. It takes time for the arm to move, which means latencies on these drives are measured in milliseconds instead of microseconds. That makes a massive difference, especially with modern PCs.

And they’re pretty slow in pulling the data off too. That didn’t matter too much until around 10 years ago when improvements in processing speed meant we hit the limitations of how we stored data. (And perhaps some shenanigans by Microsoft too around the Vista times, which broke caching of data).

They did see us through a lot of decades though, going from the IDE drive in the picture through to EIDE, SCSI and into the SATA era. Lots of acronyms there …

IDE – Integrated Drive Electronics – the bits that make it go are on the drive and they’re connected up with a 40 wire ribbon cable. You could have two of these on a cable and the “Jump Block” would select between Master and Slave. There needed to be 1 Master on a cable. One really silly drawback here was that the Heads, Cylinders and Sectors values were mismatched between the various parts of the electronics which put an artificial (528MB) limit on the size of the drives.

EIDE – Extended Integrated Drive Electronics – saw an end to that limit through some nifty translation. It also saw 80 wire ribbon cables come in to the same connector. The extra wires provided shielding to stop the signals in each wire transferring over to their neighbours. IDE and EIDE both used parallel or many wires to make them quicker, which was ok up to a point.

SCSI – Small Computer System Interface – was a competing and much superior interface from around the time of IDE. If I remember right, it could handle 8 drives on a chain, was much quicker and because it didn’t have that Head, Cylinder and Sector limit, could handle much bigger drives. But it also needed an expensive controller card at a time when we needed the scarce room and resources for sound cards and graphics and a SCSI set up would add a zero to the cost of a machine. SCSI died out when SATA appeared.

ATA and ATAPI – was the logical side of the interface. It stands for AT Attachment, with AT being the original IBM PCs. From the 80s. ATAPI stands for ATA Packet Interface, where the blobs of data would be parceled up into packets to bounce around the system. Here’s a link about ATA. We’re still using this original system for modern SATA drives.

SATA – Serial ATA – saw the 40 and 80 wire ribbon cables thrown in the bin in favour of one wire to rule them all. Ok more than one wire but instead of all the signals chattering to each other in the parallel wires, there’s just one signal wire. It meant they could crank up the speed significantly. EIDE was limited to 33MB/s with “Ultra DMA” (Direct Memory Access), my SATA SSD goes at between 300 and 500MB/s. SATA was also much easier to wire up than the PATA, the cables go round corners much better than those 40 and 80 wire ribbons.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a chubby animal I think sitting in a tree. It's holding up a paw, with the captions being "WHOA !! Now that's too much information"

I’m probably letting the geek out a bit too much there. I did mean to drop a link to the site I stole the hard disc picture from though. Here we are, I’d be curious to hear which you think is more understandable, this site (linky) or my ramblings above.

There is another drive type, the nVME or non-Volatile Memory Express. This was an interface designed for how SSDs, instead of SSDs being shackled to the ATA system from last century. It’s much quicker. But apparently it’s also too new for my desktop machine to handle so the new drive is going to be just games and data. I’m ok with that.

To other things !

I mentioned I’m only “mostly” ok above … What’s up at the moment ? Headaches and a poorly back this week. I think I have answers for my outsides, I apparently have a light tomato sensitivity. Too many cup-a-soups, or pizza and I’ll see the impact on my healing outsides. But it’s not a serious one, I should be able to have the tomato soup or pizza in moderation.

I think the headaches are resulting from my latest pair of glasses. The test was done with a mask on in pandemic conditions, so there’s going to be alignment issues there. I’m sensitive to those, they cause headaches. It’s sad to have to retire glasses that cost £500 (two pairs, distance and reader) but I think I’m going to have to retire them early.

And the poorly back is just … a reminder of an older injury. It should improve but I’ll probably have to look after it for a while. I have the poorly wrist as well at the moment, which means I shouldn’t be testing the Starfield out on the new SSD arrangements … Conveniently, there’s good streams on at the moment so those have my attention.

On that note … to the streams ! Nite all. Hope the geekiness isn’t too weird and obscure this time.

Tech, feedback and there must be a third thing

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October 10, 2023

9:45 pm

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technology

,

Hello everyone,

I had the idea to look at tech again.

Picture. Meme. We're looking downwards at a black dog and a shaggy brown haired dog. Their mouths are open. They are eager. They are looking directly at a grille with cookies on. The caption "We are here to delete your cookies".
Do they mean Deleat ?

I’m not in danger of going for any serious PC upgrades any time soon, although I did acquire a nVME solid state device disc drive that caused me a little bit of grief. If you remember back a couple of posts, my desktop PC has the following disc drives lurking inside :

It boots off a 500GB SATA m2 SSD, which works very nicely. It just doesn’t have the space for games like Starfield and now Forza Motorsport which each take 120GB. Yep. Chonky.

There’s a smaller SSD in there as well but I don’t use that one any more, just haven’t removed it.

I have two active conventional hard discs, an older 1.5TB drive and a newer 3TB drive. That’s where the games and the multitude of memes go. It’s actually a bit of an accident that they’re both active, I copied the contents over but forgot to update the linking of one of the drive partitions.

(A partition is where you split up the drive into sections. It used to be handy in older times, not so useful now, plus it’s how you would split up Windows and Linux installations)

And then there’s the 2TB fast SSD hanging out the back of the machine inside a USB enclosure. It works much better for Starfield, which is much more playable on that drive. It’s still got issues but not nearly as many as if you try and play it on a conventional hard disc. What’s the issue there ?

Picture. We're looking at a benchmark result for a hard disc. It's showing the Read and Write speeds and a mixture of both. More info coming in the text.
For a 3TB conventional hard disc

These will be results taken last month. That first one is for my 3TB conventional drive. The things to look at there are the 158ish for the SEQ1M (sequential access?). That’s how quickly the machine is pulling the data off the drive. The IOPS is for Input/Output Operations Per Second, giving 166 on reads and 423 on writes. The RND4K is the time in microseconds it takes the drive to start doing its thing. The read is higher on almost 6000 microseconds, the write is quicker at 2356 microseconds. I think the difference there is because on a read, the drive has to find exactly what you want. On a write, it’s just looking for spare space. It doesn’t care what’s in the empty space.

Picture. We're looking at another benchmark output for a hard disc, this time it's for a solid state device drive. More info coming in the text.
Results for my older SSD

Those are the numbers for my older SSD, which is installed in the correct slot in the motherboard. It’s a SATA disc, which is why the numbers for Read (516) and Write (442) aren’t particularly high. Where all SSDs shine is in the IOPS, where it’s doing almost 10,000 reads per second and 16,646 writes per second. It’s taking 103 microseconds to find everything you want. That’s important if all of your information is either spread into many little files or if you need to find just the right bit of information. Starfield is crippled when it comes to the voice acting, it needs that fast to find thing in order to do voices without massive pauses.

Picture. Another hard disc benchmark result. This time for the new drive that's installed in a USB enclosure. More coming in the text.
Results for my new SSD that’s in the wrong place

And last one, that’s the results for my nVME SSD that’s currently in an external USB enclosure. It’s doing fairly ok in that box to be honest. It’s seriously crippled by the USB interface (it’s not the fast one) but the 234 microseconds for the Random Read is still exceptional compared to the old style hard disc. The 40MB/s read and write is showing where everything is limited by the cable it’s squeezing the data through. I suspect the data flooding the cable is also why the Random Input/Output Operations Per Second is only around the 4000s as well.

I’ll be curious to see how the new drive does when it’s installed in a widget that’ll let it go full speed. That’ll arrive tomorrow for installation in the evening after I finish up work.

As for curiosity, I did a check on PC prices again last night. But instead of looking at similar devices to what’s in Meltdown, I looked at the Intel options instead. What I noticed surprised me a fair bit but it backed up something I noticed with the AMD machines.

(Jargon busting – there are two competing computer processor makers at the moment, they cost about the same but I went with AMD because they are apparently technically superior now, that’ll vary over time)

The surprise comes from the hardware makers moving on really quickly from older technology. Meltdown is based on a 4 year old Ryzen 5 3600 processor that fits into a X570 chipset motherboard. What’s a chipset ?

Picture. We're looking at a block diagram of a computer architecture. More coming in the text again.
UNLEASH THE NERDISM

What are we looking at there ? The green blob is the processor and the chipset’s job is to martial all of the data going around the system. To the left, we have 3 orange blobs talking directly to the processor. That’s for PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Express lanes that couple the processor to the graphics card. There’s a huge amount of data going through that link. There’s also huge amount of data going to hard discs and USB devices. The chipset comes in over to the right, it handles everything else like your keyboard, mouse and any controllers. It also gives access for the other drives in the system or in the olden days, things like dvd decoder cards or sound cards. Oh ! Chipset is how the sound chips in the system connect up.

Each type of processor has a specific set of chipsets designed for it, usually a good one and a budget one. The good one for my Ryzen 5 3600 third generation of that type is the X570 chipset. I could put a newer 5th gen Ryzen 5 5600 processor in there if I wished to. But … there are only 3 of those listed on Scan today. That means the manufacturers have effectively put it in the bin for the newer model.

It’s the same with Intel, there are only two of the older Socket 1200 Z590 boards available (ok there are more but they are double the price). There are 64 (sixty four) of the current Socket 1700 boards available.

So yeah, the old systems have gone in the bin even though the processors for them are still very available.

It was a curious and a little bit eye opening check realising that yesterday. What does it mean though ? Firstly, you have to be really careful about what you buy. Going for that slightly older 2 year old Socket 1200 cpu will give a massive problem in finding something for it to fit into. It’s been put in the bin for the 13th gen Socket 1700 chips released in October last year.

That’s a fun one for anyone thinking about obsolescence by the way … I might know some of them :-D.

Secondly … if you don’t care about obsolescence issues, then it can mean that it’s a PERFECT time to buy. The processor in my one year old laptop is an 11th gen laptop chip. Acer could well have been giving the big discounts because they needed to dump the stock while they thought they could.

So that’s the lesson I picked up … keep an eye on the market, sometimes opportunities come up because the people who make stuff are shifting from one product to the next and they want to dump the old stuff. Meltdown got put together when it did because AMD had just come out with a very superior product. The Dwagonsong laptop was bought because product change had led to huge discounts.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a cute little white dog on a sofa, with paws on a laptop. The dog is wearing a sweater and a red and white bobble hat. The caption is "If you don't want me to shop online, you really shouldn't use my name for all of your passwords."

Quite. I think that’s enough for me for today, back to watching Billietrixx (Twitchy link) while she’s still on and then I’m somewhat grinding through the first book in the Silo series. I’m not quite sure what to make of that, the pacing feels off compared to the other books I’ve been enjoying far more. It feels hugely padded with a lot of character introspection which I don’t think exactly adds much.

We’ll see. Good night everyone, enjoy your books, your music (Dire Straits Making Movies track now – Expresso Love) and the rest of your evening.

And there’s a thought … (adds Dire Straits Alchemy to the wish list)

PS Forgot the feedback thing … The Novotel from Sheffield started badgering me for feedback … so they got feedback. It wasn’t the feedback they wanted. (TLDR – got nickel and dimed on extra charges, go with the competition instead)

In the North, with creators

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October 3, 2023

8:29 pm

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events

,

Hello everyone,

I had an away trip over the weekend … It was for an event called Creator North, run by the ever bouncy adorable bundle of fun that is Tashnarr, the effervescent Billietrixx, the lovely LookitsTilly and Maddog, assisted with the cameras by Brookie.

I don’t have many pictures of the event itself (was enjoying talking to people a bit too much) but … the weekend involved a bit of wander around Sheffield and this fella happened :

Picture. We're looking at a small red dwagon with a white chest sitting on a laptop keyboard, with a screen behind showing a chat window. The dwagon is made out of thread, woven into life.
Yep. I did a rescue

Links time ? Lots of links. The event itself has a home here : https://creatornorth.uk/#page-top

It’s an event that came about to be a gathering point for creators who weren’t able to make it to other events. Almost all of the creator events that happen in the UK are concentrated around London, or maybe a bit of Scotland’s two cities too. There are events at Birmingham NEC but most of them, like the Twitch events and the EGX gaming expo have moved to London. That’s less than ideal for a lot of people. Actually including me and I live in the South too. So our fab foursome set up Creator North as a meet up for creators living in the North of the UK.

And although I’m South and it was 180 miles away for me, I thought I’d take the chance to meet these wonderful people and add that little bit of support to the day. I’m really glad I did too, it was a very enjoyable little event. Cozy and still with a lot of lovely people.

So who were the organisers ?

There’s Tashnarr (Twitch link), who doesn’t stream so much now but it’s always fun when she can find the time outside of organising other events. Tashnarr is an adorable little bean and it’s been a treat to be able to follow those streams. Although there is that … guilt? feeling (not sure it’s guilt) where you missed out on so much of their earlier content due to just simply not knowing about them. You might also recognise the name from such things as …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a somewhat diamond shaped spaceship. There are two engine pods at the back (top of shot), a notch where the pilot is at the front and two long antenna like things at the corners. The ship is dominated by the reflection of a sun but we can see blue with yellow highlight colouration. In the background, the disc of the galaxy.

That’s Zoomnarr, the ship which was my third attempt at speed running to the Galactic Core in Elite Dangerous. I do like to do tribute names for people with my spaceships (it gives me an excuse to say nice things about them). Zoomnarr was the second ship named for Tashnarr after the rather weakly named Grabnarr and then the rather better named Manic Minarr followed. It’s a sign of how high I regard this lovely one that three tribute ships happened 😀 (Oh and I thought of Manic Minarr and that pun had to happen).

Next one up is Billietrixx (twitch link again), I’ve only been following Billie for apparently 9 months now (that’s how long the Twitch sub has run) and found her through raiding into Tashnarr’s channel and Tash raiding into Billie. That’s how most of the cross connections happen, people you like raiding other people that they like. (When a streamer finishes, they’ll raid over to another channel to give their audience someone fun to continue watching) Billie another one who brings her own special energy to the streams, it’s mad, maybe a little manic but always passionate about the game and enjoying the game with chat. Pleasure to watch, fun to natter to via stream chat. And a lovely one to introduce the event to everyone on Saturday.

It was a pleasure chatting with Billie, Tashnarr and we need to mention LookitsTilly (Twixxer link) who organises events, is a lovely Twitch mod and was also a pleasure to talk to on Saturday. And then there’s Maddog (Twixxer link), if you play any of the Guitar Hero type games, you may be using his song request bot …

And I also got to meet Bentham again, aka Mangledpork (here’s his Twitch). He’s a lovely gent, I’ve been steadily realising that me and him resemble each other a lot (if not in appearance, there’s a picture on the Creator North discord of Bentham accidentally looking way more dapper than I ever will). Bentham likes his factory and crafting games. He’s currently playing Valheim and I so nearly would be watching now if not for another new person to me from Creator North called Curlylocks.

When CausticPhoenix finishes up (hi Caustic!) in a minute, I’ll head over to the Curly one. Who’s Caustic ? Here’s the old Twixxer link. Most of the time I see Caustic, she’ll be hosting a working stream but Caustic will also get super passionate and drawn into gameplay streams. So passionate it leads to super excitable (and hilarious) clip moments for victories, scares and the unexpected. Caustic has a few fingerprints on this blog too after dropping in a few comments, hugely appreciated. I need to get back to applying some more of those comments too. Constant improvement is always good.

So, that was Creator North ! Lovely meet up, very glad I went up there to Sheffield for it. Would totally do it again. Hopefully they can put another one on soon.

Other things about the trip ? I could do without the behaviour on the roads at the moment, Friday saw a lot of inexplicable stop start traffic. Like the outside lane suddenly just stopping … That’s supposed to be the fast lane. Other drivers will also make it awkward for you to get past, by speeding up as you’re going past them. They’ll be doing (I’m being charitable) 60, you’re going past at the 70 speed limit, they’ll speed up to match you. And worse behaviour. I don’t get it, drivers shouldn’t get involved with other drivers like that. I like to think of my awareness as a box of 9 (3 by 3, you’re in the centre) when I’m driving. When people go outside of that box, I don’t care about them any more unless they’ve identified themselves for special attention. And then I’ll keep an eye out for shenanigans.

But yeah, behaviour on the roads is poor, mostly because other drivers seem to insist on getting the better of other drivers. I really don’t get it.

Hotel for the weekend was Novotel. It was a nice room with all the facilities (that I don’t use, just had water) plus secure parking. Staff were nice, full of smiles. But … I think I got overcharged for breakfast and parking (double charge for 2 nights stay), which is what I’ll remember of Novotel. There are other chains, I’ve never been overcharged on the work trips with the other chains.

Sheffield was a good city to have a wander around. It’s a little odd in that the main shopping areas are split. Most cities have their shopping area all clustered around one place. Moor Market was a good one to check out, plus there was a festival with a stand with the Rescue Dwagon you can see up top.

So that was my weekend ! It was lovely to see everyone at Creator North. Little events are just right for me. Too many people trip something that might be social anxiety ? Dunno there, perhaps it’s splitting attention between so many people.

Anyway, Creator North was great. Oh ! I haven’t mentioned yet ! There was cake.

Drawing. One of mine so it's a bit crude. A large cup cake is on a table to the right. To the left, a forlorn looking green dwagon is standing on tip toes with chin and paws resting on the table. The cake is out of reach. The dwagon is thinking "Caaaaaake"

The cake was lush. The people were lovely. And it was great to meet a bunch of people that I’ve only known from the other side of the screen.