I like exploring in computer games, music, cricket, drawing and pizza and sharing those with people. Oh and I also inherited the name Sleepydwagonman too ! The site is a work in progress at the moment but it's getting there, features will come in over time !
Not feeling so good this evening, so it’ll be a short one from me today and generally keeping the lights lower and the sound deadened. Might even go to bed before the cricket starts ! (England in New Zealand at 10pm UK).
I’ll be ok, I just felt like I got hit in the head with a bat after completing doing a presentation thing for work earlier. So instead of heading into town to have a Xmas munchie with the team, I’m staying away from bright lights, noises and overstimulation.
I suspect a good few people reading will fully understand the effects when that happens.
Just gotta avoid that brain temptation of wanting to dive into a game again. I did start a new journey yesterday …
Err yeah, I shouldn’t continue with that tonight ! It’s the prologue mission from Mass Effect and that’s become a legendary game series from the last couple of decades … but it does go for the flashing lights and some strobe effects.
If you somehow haven’t played Mass Effect, I’d thoroughly recommend taking a look at it. The game series is regularly given massive (90% off) discounts as well. The first person cover shooter style gameplay is very tight and it carries an excellent story through pretty much to the end.
For now though, dinner’s on the way, Woahhjess is doing a chill Rimworld stream over on Twitch and I’ll be looking forwards to seeing what Tashnarr has for us today over on the Instagrams.
I should improve again tomorrow, I’m able to turn on what I call a survival mode which gets me home in cases where the lights are starting to swim in front of my eyes or if I’m in an overstimulation. Plus I closed my eyes earlier and opened them again after 2dKiri (a lovely Austrian chill gaming streamer) had switched over to someone else.
And I’m rambling again – enjoy your evenings everyone ! See you tomorrow 🙂
Super battle droid today, which leads me to talking techie stuff 🙂
I think I’ve mentioned this before … I’m going to be upgrading the tech at some point in the not that distant future. First up … to follow today’s advent model being a droid :
New phone ! My current phone (a Pixel 4) has been properly excellent. It does all I need it to do, it’s really surprised me with how good the night sight camera mode is and the only way it gets intrusive is by nagging me to enable to back up modes that’ll have all my pictures going off to Google to be harvested by whatever AI they say isn’t going to be trained on our pictures (but you know it will be).
There are 3 things pointing me towards an upgrade :
Memory size – I do like taking pictures (and copying them through from camera) and the memory is filling up;
Battery life – it’s 5 years old now and I think the battery is degrading
Contract – it’s 5 years old now 😀 and my contract was completed a while ago.
No, it’ll be an Android phone because I don’t want to have my phone subject to Apple’s policy on forced hardware obsolescence and whether or not we own our devices. Talking of that …
My iPad Mini 2 (that’s probably 10 years old, it’s done well) looks like it’s only good for being a Kindle app thing now. It’s asking for an update to iOS 12.7, it can’t handle the latest iOS and therefore I can’t update its browser or most of the other apps to the current versions. So it’s now useless as a portable computing device, outside of being an excellent e-reader device.
If I do upgrade the iPad, it’ll be the same again because the Mini size is a good size. The display is easily readable even with my deteriorating eyes (I am old, hear my roar. It’s pain from the latest back twinge) and it’s more compact than the full size ones. Compact is good.
Might have to change that in the car though. (Gosh, this post is actually flowing from device to device, never saw that coming)
The issue with the car is that it’s a bit low. It’s challenged by the larger speed ramps around here, so I really don’t want to take it to less paved places if I ever do the stargazing thing properly. (Gonna need to arrange some away from home storage for that I think)
I’m actually looking a bit at the Lexus LBX again, it actually has a somewhat usable boot. Other than that though, I do greatly like the 2 pedal driving of an auto box and the Toyota/Lexus hybrids mesh very well with how I like to drive. The gearbox brain aligns with how I want the car to respond when I change the throttle input. But I might need to look at something bigger. No real solid idea of what to get next though and that era of The Last Car is looming (when they ban sales of cars with petrol engines and everyone without the ability to charge an electric car is stuffed).
Car as tech ? Definitely a thing these days. It’s a long time since I drove a car possibly without any transistors in (the Fiesta didn’t even have a radio). Now it’s Bluetooth, drive by wire, brake by wire, electric throttle, two motor generators, all the engine management, a number of display screens, memory seat and all the rest of the tech in the car. There’s probably more computing power in there than my PCs even going to the turn of the century.
And there’s the next swing in something something techie to upgrade !
The other impending forced obsolescence thing that’s looming is the end of support for Windows 10. We’ll need to hop up to Windows 11 by that point because all the bugs that Microsoft didn’t sort out in Windows 10 before end of support will become active liabilities in our PCs that will most definitely be exploited by individuals and organisations who are able to get their stuff into our machines.
I’ve had malware affect me adversely three times :
First Acer laptop, which acquired keyloggers from something associated with the Eve Online website. That saw my log in credentials getting stolen and temporary loss of account. The Eve admin people retrieved that but it did lead to the compromise of a lot of my passwords from that time.
Something nasty got in from a website, which got past the User Permission thingy popup, murdered Defender like it wasn’t there and it was corrupting my browsing, serving ads etc. That needed a system restore to fix.
Third goes way back … when a piece of malware called Blaster was fully capable of scanning the internet to find a vulnerable machine, uploading itself and infecting that machine within fifteen minutes of it being connected to the internet. Yep. This happened on a machine I was setting up with a completely fresh Windows XP install, it was able to get in and infect before anti-virus could be installed to stop it. I saw the install due to the Zonealarm (remember that ?) firewall popping up with an outgoing connection request.
My current PC, Meltdown, has done well with a Ryzen 5 3600 processor and an upgrade to a 3060Ti and bigger SSD since install. But it was struggling a little bit with the more open areas of Star Wars Outlaws and that plus that looming Windows 10 out of support is making me think I need to retire a Windows install that dates back to Oct 2011 and Windows 7 in Pumpkin and replace it with … This is what I’m looking at :
AMD Ryzen 5 again, it’s a good combination of economic to buy and the power on the chip. I’ll get 64 GB of memory this time and couple it to one of the 5060Ti graphics cards. Which means waiting until they become affordable sometime after they come out in Jan. I’ll debate until purchase whether I go for one Solid State Device (SSD) drive or two :
One SSD – it keeps things simple. But … an SSD kinda wears out over time and not in the same way as physical wear to bearings will eventually kill the old magnetic platter based drives. Each time data is written to an SSD, that takes a little bit of life out of it. Too much of that and it starts to sacrifice its total storage capacity. The 5 year old one in Meltdown that has Windows on it is still doing well and has all of its bits available but the CrystaldiskInfo application is telling me that it’s down to 57% health, which I think is based on how much it’s been writing, erasing and rewriting bits of itself.
Two SSD – one smaller one for Windows, one whopper for games. The idea is that the little one gets rewritten a lot by whatever Windows does, while the whopper for games just looks out for data storage (textures and graphics and voices are big) and doesn’t get rewritten as much.
Apparently my boot disk has had 46,572 GB happen to it and it’s just a 464.7GB drive. So each memory bit it contains has been rewritten on average of 100 times over 5 years of operation. Maybe. I might not be interpreting that right.
I think that’s it for me for tonight. Mass Effect Legendary completed downloading and I’m tempted to dive into it when I should be giving a dodgy shoulder a break.
It’s been good to be back into popping these natter chats in for you all 🙂
I think I have a little behind the scenes stuff to catch up on here :-D. I’m seeing a “Generate with AI” button on the picture uploads, which I will never use and kinda object to the WordPress mod people adding there ! Oh dear, just started and we’re massively tangenting already. Only one thing to do there … grab that tangent and dive right on in !
Tangent 1 – AI generated pictures … I won’t call them art because I don’t consider it art in the same way as someone putting their soul into what they make is art. But I have seen some wonderful pictures where people take a number of objects and a theme and weave them together into something that looks absolutely stunning. That’s a bit different from people just putting “a fierce dragon with a sword in a fantasy setting” into a picture generator and getting something out that looks almost identical to something Askren (aka Exploding Dice) has taken days to make and was paid to create.
(Askren is a good egg, check him out, that’s the Twixxer link above which probably won’t last that much longer).
Tangent 2 ! Social media. I’ve been struggling to keep up with these lately. I’ll monitor Instagram closely because I have that tightly curated down to only show me a small number of selected individuals who post content on there that makes me happy. I’ve been enjoying the general vibe on Bluesky, the artist and author community there is fun to keep up with. Twixxer is dying a death due to the policies being introduced to it and … Farcebook is algorithm driven and doesn’t let you keep up with people without spam being introduced.
The main thing there is … social media can be very overwhelming. It can be a bit too much trying to keep up with it all. It’s ok if you need to withdraw from it and go a bit lower profile on it. Look after yourselves. If it’s getting too much, consider dropping the follows of people who don’t bring you joy or otherwise reduce how much you feel obliged to keep up with it all.
I’m mostly going to be doing fairly random posts throughout advent (including tangents when they hit) but also maybe getting led by the day’s model … It’s a TIE Fighter today, which is taking me back (way back) to the first space fighter game that had me addicted on PC. It’s TIE Fighter from the days of the 486 based machine. Yep. Last century. TIE Fighter was a really, really good game in its time. Excellent graphics and a tight, responsive flight model. There was a decent story running through as well, TIEing all of the missions together.
I went to the X Wing game a little later, I actually enjoyed TIE Fighter more. The missions were difficult but I managed to complete them all. Whereas some of the missions in XWing got me stuck and I couldn’t get past them.
Fast forward a whole heap of years and we get to …
That’s from Star Wars Outlaws and has our player character, Kay Vess, looking at a spaceship called the Trailblazer. I really enjoyed this game. I’d effectively rented it from the publisher because … it’s really expensive. I can easily afford the asking price to buy it (£95 for the version with a season pass for expansions), I just don’t want to pay that much for a game. I did massively enjoy it though and will happily play it again when the discounts are low enough. 25% (current Steam sale) is a decent start at a discount but …. I got other games to play first before going back to Outlaws.
It was a lot of fun though and I did love feeling immersed in the world that the developers created for us. They gave us something special here. That’s my honest opinion there, lots of other opinions are out there about this one. If you’re deciding whether to play it, please go by the opinions of people who have actually played it, not the ones who see : female protagonist, Star Wars not what they would have done and all of the other weird prejudices people get.
I think I might be getting a bit too excited there and it’s telling in how my shoulder is behaving :-D. (It’s a little sore and is making my right hand start to be numb again).
I better leave it there, maybe another epic screenshot ?
That’s from the Mos Eisley space port, first seen in the original movie. I loved seeing the little Easter Eggs that they seeded through the game, including this line up of the various speeders from the various movies.
Also oh look, just under a day to go on the Steam sale. I have the following in the cart and should really buy :
Mass Effect Legendary edition – I enjoyed going back to Deus Ex Human Revolution again and playing this fresh. So the Mass Effect games at 92% off (£3.99) have the attention.
Slipways and soundtrack – a somewhat speculative one at 50% off (£8.08). This one is a space strategy game.
Tank Mechanic Simulator – ok, a weird one but I did enjoy Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. This one is 76% off for £3.71.
Tavern Master’s Pirate Cove DLC – no discount, this one is £4.29 and I did enjoy building a legendary tavern in the original game which looks like its lost its discount early.
Ok, that’s it for me for tonight, enjoy the rest of your evening, see you tomorrow. I’m going to be concentrating on enjoying the rest of Billietrixx’s Twitch (with link) stream, Tessachka (linky) is on the laptop and there’s a Mike Oldfield album playing in the background.
Good jumper, also lots of alt text that time. I do like the jumper there, I’d wear one of those IRL. (Blue with a walker vehicle to the right, a defence laser lower left and a snow speeder attack craft in the sky)
I thought I’d talk books today … I’ll be back with more Cruise Things later but I’m trying to space things out a bit. Space ?
That’s what I’m reading at the moment, with Aftershocks by Marko Kloos. It’s the first of a set of 4, which was a bit of an impulse buy with all 4 books on offer for 99p each. Can’t resist a bargain like that and the reader reviews were really good. I’m enjoying it so far, it’s set in the aftermath of a huge system wide war five years after peace was declared or rather imposed on the people who started it. It’s being an intriguing set up so far, it feels like there’s a lot going on. With a lot of hints about how the situation is being steadily developed from people behind the scenes who we haven’t met yet.
Worth checking out.
Solution … buy another book !
I actually went through 3 on the cruise. I finished off the excellent Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. He’s someone I had a bit of a rough start with on his books because I didn’t gel with Children of Time much at all (too much swapping between viewpoints and timelines) but Eyes of The Void is a really good continuation of what started with Shards of Earth. It’s post apocalyptic scifi, where just as humanity was getting started with expansion into the universe, moon sized alien things appeared and started reworking planets into artworks. With the people on. Eyes of the Void is a really good middle book, building on how the characters and universe got established in the first book and moving on the story at pace. I’m curious to see how the author finishes off the story.
Much recommend. I’ve enjoyed all of the Adrian Tchaikovsky books since going back to them with Dogs of War.
Before then was Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Another fun romp, where you’re drawn into the world that the main character has suddenly found themselves dropped into. John Scalzi has a wonderful, easy to read style, with fun varied characters that get the chance to breathe. Oh and surprises along the way, you can see some of the bits of the end coming but it’ll be a fun surprise all the way. I started reading John Scalzi’s books with Redshirts, which is an essential if you’re interested in the Star Trek universe.
Oh and he’s a standard bearer over on Bluesky too, showing the way to go to have a good time over there and generally make it a fun chilled out space to keep up with.
Suitably for cruise times, I chose Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days. It dates back to a journey made well back in 1988, when the world and the technology with us was a very different place. I think mobile phones existed ! But they were massive chunky things with battery packs, not exactly like the massively portable, massively capable things we have now. And the political situation evolves too, including how open the travel is. I think this was in the days before travellers in the Suez Canal area needed to be as wary of pirates, plus the world was as dangerous in places for all the different reasons.
Michael Palin has a dry humour running through his books and it’s an honest commentary often showing and explaining things that we didn’t see on the series. I’ll keep collecting and reading his books. Oh ! One fun coincidence was seeing someone on the cruise bring Michael Palin’s Erebus to breakfast with him one morning. Cue a little natter about books while ignoring the 3 other people at that table who switched from speaking English to speaking French as soon as we arrived. (Almost all of the other guests were lovely and not like that)
Yes. Meme game is strong tonight.
I’ve finished off a series called The Belt by Gerald M Kilby. It’s the last of a set of 6, set in a future solar system where humanity has spread out as far as the gas giants. They’re quite short books, not much to them to be honest but they have a decent story running through them and I’m glad I saw them through to the finish. All I ask for in a book or a series is that the end either wraps everything up really well … or it leaves it at a place that is satisfying yet leaves you hoping there will be more. The Expanse worked well for that, it wrapped up its major story arc while leaving lots of room for more stories in that universe.
And that’s all you can ask, that you enjoy what you’re reading. I’ve seen comments on the socials that people think that authors are all in competition with each other. It actually works as completely the opposite. The authors encourage each other to do the best they can and keep on writing. They’ll understand that what they take months to write, us dedicated avid readers could demolish in less than a day (I’m not that quick). That just means …
More authors is great ! We’ll happily buy all of the books from the people we enjoy reading. And the more authors in the game, the more there is for us to enjoy. We need all the authors so that we have something new and fun to read while we’re waiting for that most favourite author to give us something new and wonderful. One day we’ll be in a Gareth L Powell, then an Aliette de Bodard, over to John Scalzi, following an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel, enjoying not feeling smart enough for the John D. Clark science book (rocket fuel, very complex) or even going back in time for a bit of Heinlein.
Enjoy your reading, have a wonderful day. See you tomorrow.
It’s been a while again, I did mostly intend to do some posts while I was at sea but it didn’t quite work out that way. A lot of that is down to where my own headspace was (it’s improved now) when I disappeared. Some of it down to enjoying the cruise as well. Sometimes you really do need that time away from the world to get centred again and do a little reset.
Advent ? Here we are :
There we are, I’ll hopefully find something suitable for you every day. Like I’m not going to drop 12 days of cruise all at once :-D. Little X Wing there for day 1, with little Ellardy there for scale. The cruise turned into a bit of a Dwagon On Tour with the pictures. The little fella wasn’t in all of the pictures but was definitely in a lot of them. Let’s see …
This time around, it was the Mystery Cruise with Fred Olsen, going from Southampton to Portsmouth and 6 ports in between. We’d find out where we were docking up when we arrived (although there were niceties with international shipping conventions that meant we could find out early). There was much speculation as to where we were going … Some thought we might head East to south Scandinavia (my theory). Others were looking south.
We headed south in the end, although that did lead to a couple of uncomfortable crossings of the Bay of Biscay. It’s not a forgiving place for shipping :-D. So I spent the first day and a bit being quite uncomfortable from a combination of not having my sea legs and my own metabolism and psychology ganging up on me. (I unconsciously don’t do a number 2 unless I trust the place and it takes a couple of days to get that unconscious trust – it’s silly and I don’t know why it’s in my head!)
That’s us in our second port of Ferrol in Northern Spain. This’ll be a quicker kinda intro overview for the cruise. I’ll go into each port separately in later ports.
The whole thing about cruising is that the ship will go from port to port, where you’ll see new things at each place. And then you can retreat back and be extremely well looked after when you’re back on board. And we were very well looked after by Fred’s people.
There’s a certain etiquette that each cruise line will go by. Hurtigruten were very casual. Fred’s ship was a bit more formal than that but still somewhere you could happily relax as a casual person that doesn’t really do formal stuff. Other cruise lines are more formal, like I won’t include Cunard on my samplings of the different cruise lines because I think they’re Too formal.
I have to admit that I was rethinking my life choices on the first Wednesday, when I had the bloating and the sea sickness from crossing the Bay of Biscay. But managed to reset my head (and body) during the first port visit on the Thursday.
So – cruise as a whole : really enjoyed it. Wanting to go back on a cruise as soon as I can get away with it. Probably not with Fred’s people just yet … however I would happily recommend them to people looking at a good company to go on any holiday with. (I’m just wanting to sample everyone’s offers but there is a tempting August 2026 solar eclipse cruise …)
The excellent customer service started when preparing for the cruise, I think I commented before that it was making me happy seeing the details steadily come in through the post. And that continued on board with my cabin being looked after by the lovely MT (hello MT !) and our dining table in the main restaurant was being looked after by a chap from India who, true to form for me, was a lovely guy and super polite. They’d be asking me about what I was seeing and I think they were being as invested in the adventures of the Little Red Dwagon as everyone else who was seeing me suddenly bounce off somewhere to set up a picture.
It was a genuinely fun time.
I won’t go into it too much more here outside of a little : people can look really fine on the outside when they are definitely NOT fine. I needed a chance to get out of the world for a little while and the cruise let me do just that. Whereas a hotel trip can be … good while you’re cozy, there’s still the travel involved. A cruise handles all the travel for you, plus the crew are wonderful people. It makes for a lovely time and, as it was last year, just what I needed.
We were looked after incredibly well. Food was great, I could always have something compatible with my curious requirements. (I’m find with fish but have trouble with steak these days) And I really enjoyed being able to wander around the decks, including doing circuits of the Promenade deck looking out to the sea and the view we were getting from the open part of the upper deck.
I think that’s it for me for this post, have a lovely evening everyone. I’ll be aiming to do an advent post every day, so more cruising posts interspersed with other things like gaming, reading and the music. I haven’t got a theme in mind this year, I did that a few times over previous years and I think it burned me out on the blog posting a fair bit. Maybe doing 3 themes in a post every day was a bit much.
Still, time’s turning, hope you all have a good holiday season and you get the chance to be able to look after yourself :-).
