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 !
How are things going with you all ? Hope you’re doing ok. As for me, I’ve had another couple of runs to the hospitals (routine stuff) and I’m getting started on the rehab. Life’s had to change a little bit down here, as you’d expect from being mostly down an arm. I should get most of the mobility back, although I can feel that the left wrist is still quite delicate. Oh and I’ve been told that playing games can also be a decent part of rehab activity.
How’s that ! Not sure if I quite believe that but I’ll go with it. Talking of the games, I got a care package through …
That’s a plushie from the Intel people who were a key sponsor for the September Creator Meetups event. There’s a get well soon card with a lovely message. A Creator Meetups coaster and my red dwagon there is sporting a event sash (actually wristband, don’t tell the dwagon). There’s also a t-shirt, although that’s not in the picture.
The care package was a lovely thing to open today. I’ll talk more about the event some time but for now, I’ll keep it to just mentioning the Intel part … they were one of the main sponsors, which helps to make events like the last Creator North happen. We need their support and it’s hugely appreciated. I think they (could have been Asus too) were running the PC speed build thing at the latest event which was fun to keep an eye on. I didn’t take part in that … I’m excessively careful when I’m building my PCs so speed running them isn’t something I’d do but it was good to peek at.
Talking of PC building … it’s shameless shill time ! Bunny is an AMD build but I figured I owe Intel a mention, both due to the care package and for them supporting the events that they do. Disclosure note – the care package is a gift, attendance of the event was paid for by me, Pumpkin PC (about to mention) was fully bought by me, no other compensation has been received. I.e. this is an unprompted post.
So I mentioned that my current build is AMD, my longest serving PC is still Pumpkin built Oct 31 2011, going until July 2019. Pumpkin did really well and was super reliable. I don’t look for extreme speed in a PC, that tends to double the price for not really that much extra speed. I look for a build that I can put together, set up and then forget about for years while I watch videos and game on it. And Pumpkin excelled at that. The only technical issues it had was a Corsair power supply popping and the motherboard sound hardware popping.
And that was the trend with Intel for a very long time. They had a performance edge on AMD until recently but what they excelled at was lazy reliable performance. They could do what they do incredibly reliably and without fuss. Hassle free computing is exactly what I go for. So why did I go away from the Sandy Bridge i5-2500k powered Pumpkin ? It was struggling for performance in games due to only having 8GB of system memory. It was approaching time to change in 2019 and I’m glad I did because we all know what happened in 2020. Almost 8 years service is a phenomenal amount of time for a PC to be properly good for.
What would I get if I went Intel now ? Here’s a Partpicker link. That’s pretty much the same bits as the new Bunny PC except for the Intel core in there. The prices are about the same too. The Intel chip has a lot more cores than my AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3d at a count of 16+8 vs 8 doubling to 16 threads for the AMD. Not entirely sure what the 24+8 means …
That’s another thing actually … The Partpicker list there is fairly arbitrary although I can vouch for case, RAM, psu, graphics and SSD. I’d need to know the difference between the P and E cores. And that’s where the research comes in. It’s a lot of money to invest, gotta be sure you’re investing in the right bits.
How about me though ?
The hospital visit last week was to get an initial follow up and they changed my cast as well. Oh and I may have hit a food allergy event too. So … good visit, bad consequences for me because I didn’t realise that the cookies I’d been munching and the giant Twix all had soya within and I can’t tolerate soya. Oh well. But I did get a slightly lighter cast, some basic physio exercises and advice that playing computer games on controllers would help with the rehab. Oh and I don’t need the arm sling any more.
Good results both there and a local hospital visit with a very lovely physio who gave me a few more exercises for the rehab and an injection of hope in getting all better. Having a little hope is ultra valuable.
How about that gaming though ?
I’ve had a couple of Truck Game sessions so far. It’s a little awkward because I use a Xbox style controller. The left hand needs to cover the d-pad for set and forget options like lights and wipers. The middle finger does the brakes, first finger is left indicator and thumb does steering. Awkward but possible. The drawback with the two Truck Games is that when you start a run, you really need to finish it and my State of Being at the moment means that when I hit a certain point, I will need to STOP pretty much immediately which isn’t compatible with having to finish the runs off.
And then there’s Elite Dangerous, which actually got me started doing two handed typing again.
I use a Thrustmaster Hotas X for Elite (linky). It’s a basic Hotas as they go. You can get a lot fancier and expensive than that (search VKB and Virpil) but the Hotas X has been solid, reliable and above all comforyable for me to play Elite with. The pitch, roll and yaw are all done on the right hand stick. The left hand throttle has the forward and back and a rocker arm I use for left and right. My left thumb uses buttons for up, down and boost.
I’m not fluent with the Hotas yet in Elite but I had enough for a short(ish) travel session of 54 jumps (a session would normally be around 200 jumps). I can’t fully grip the throttle side yet, just half of it. It’s enough for travel where you can’t go up/down/left/right, not for more fine control although I could manage the external camera which is how I get all the screenies.
Oh and the big bonus …. because I do a few things very quickly, like renaming screenshots, I started two handed typing again. Big result there. Oh and Elite offers up interesting places to land at where you can often set up a good view.
I better close up there …
I’m having to do a few changes. My snacking is much reduced (which is good) and I’m adjusting to having less in my left hand. I’ve been ticking off a few IRL achievements like being able to lace up the boots, although I still have very little grip strength and even less carrying strength. Haven’t attempted long sleeves yet or the laundry (weekend thing). I need to do more of the physio exercises to get mobility back.
I’m doing ok and am fully independent here in the house, within my limits. I’m very low on energy still but it has been good being in some of the games again.
Oh and the online communities I hang around have been wonderful and have sent a lot of love my way. It’s vastly appreciated.
Credit to Purr.In.Ink there, they’re always coming out with these cute little cartoons with the best vibes.
Checks last post date … 20 August ! Oops. I should have posted before going up to the Creator North meet up on 13 September.
I … got badly hurt and I’m not long back in the world after nearly a fortnight i hospital with a shattered wrist and broken shoulder. I’ve had 2 operations and was very well looked after up in Manchester, so the long term prognosis is good but it might take a while to get there. Hopefully by the end of the year. I’ll hopefully be able to get a decent amount into this post but I am on one handed typing and my body and mind are overdrawn on reserves.
So what happened ? Short form is that the meet up was held at a skate park, there was an introduction session and I found out the hard way that skateboarding is not for 50 year old me.
Caution warning medical injury details follow but what I’m going to do is surround that by a couple of pictures. So if you find that kind of thing upsetting, PLEASE skip to the picture after the one below that will become the thumbnail to this post. I’m not out to upset anyone here with details that could cause someone nightmares. With that, here goes !
Right, so I fell off a skateboard at low speed pretty much on to my bum. My left wrist broke the fall and shock went into my left shoulder. I felt no pain at this point (I’m weird like that) but reaching over with my right hand, I realized that both bones of my forearm were broken just before the wrist. I could also feel that my left shoulder felt very wrong. I could barely bend or lean over later with waves of excruciating pain.
I was then very well looked after by the instructor and then one of the park’s first aid people before being taken to the local hospital’s Accident and Emergency by the very lovely Billietrixx (will link later) who is one of the organisers. At 4am and about 5 hours of feeling grating bones and increasing pain post adrenaline and shock in my wrist and my shoulder with my left arm locked to my side, initial treatment was complete, I could move the arm slightly, my wrist was in a cast and sling and I was off to the ward.
The damage was a broken shoulder, with the ball broken off the end of the humerus bone. Both my wrist bones were badly fractured in patterns that were giving the medics quite a bit of concern.
On Thursday 18th, I had the operation to sort out the shoulder, enabling enough movement to allow an operation on the wrist. The operation went well although there was concern about loss of feeling on the front of the shoulder.
On Monday 22nd, I had a second operation to sort out my wrist which had had complex fractures of both radius and ulna. This operation feels like it went well too although there is uncomfortable swelling still.
Both ops were under general anaesthetic, the initial reduction was in A&E with me having eyes firmly closed puffing on the anti pain vape. That’s hopefully enough of the detail bit … I have some movement (it’s restricted by a heavy cast and sling) but the bones aren’t grating inside any more. The ops installed plates and screws to stabilise everything. It’ll make things interesting around metal detector scanners.
It should be safe to read again if you are sensitive to the caution warning stuff. I did an escape on Thursday 25th, so I’m back home currently. The trip back was by train, the first half was comfy and smooth, the second half past Birmingham south was a rollercoaster. I felt heavily battered by the end and I also picked up a complex cramp in my left leg which felt like I’d turned the ankle.
So how about now ? I’m pretty much able to look after myself at home one handed. I have maybe 5% function in my left hand which will get back to … let’s see. Lots of healing to do. A lot of the restriction is in a very heavy cast which interferes with gripping things. Did you realise that putting on a headset is pretty much a two handed action ? Possible but tricky to do that one handed.
My energy is extremely low. I was able to crack open the work laptop on Friday to do some essential things. It was great to see the people on our weekly team call too. My mental state is … interesting. My emotions are wide open at the moment, so I’m going to concentrate on positive vibes (catching up on videos and streams there). I need to avoid negativity (while not pushing a very worrying family situation away that I’m not going to talk about here).
I have what’s called a Fit Note which states that I’m unfit to work for a while, that leaves an option to still work at the discretion of the injured person so I’ll continue to be on the work laptop. I just need to understand that it’s going to take much longer to do tasks and there are going to be other restrictions.
It’s not just the left arm that I need to look after, it’s my other 3 limbs and my head too. I get mental zoomies which I need to direct into things that keep me happy and/or productive. Can’t help that. I can’t just rot more and play one hand compatible games for the next few months. My right arm is already complaining at the extra awkward work it’s doing too. Legs are ok now after the cramps.
I’m running out of energy so I need to close out, quick stuff :
Billietrixx (twitch link) and Lookitstilly (twitch link) looked after me so well by first taking me to the hospital and staying there until having to go back to the event. And then by rescuing my stuff from the hotel room. I owe a huge debt to these two incredible ladies.
There was also an incredible amount of kindness and positive vibes coming from the online communities and friends that carried me through too. If you’re reading this and helped or thought of me in any way, you are an absolute LEGEND to me. Thank you so much.
Thanks to the gentlemen with me on the ward, there was a little core of lovely guys there who made it a very chill healing place to be for the almost fortnight. Get well soon guys. I think the staff appreciated our bay being a chill place to be too.
The doctors who patched me up. I’m restricted in movement still just two weeks after the severe injuries but it’s with huge thanks to them that the ops went well and I’ll hopefully get most of my left arm function back, if not all of it.
MASSIVE thanks to the nursing staff up in Manchester who looked after us so well providing a wonderful safe healing environment.
A to Z challenge for pointing me at most of the books read. I read no less than 7 while I was there : The Last Emperox by John Scalzi (recommended but it be book 3 of 3, Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell (good book to start a series), Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings (interesting but long), The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher (good, not her best), The Year Stardust Fell by Raymond F Jones (reads old but story is good), Status Quo by Drew Wagar (fast start to series needs better edits) and Star Centurion by Miles Rozak (pulpy sci fi adventure fun). I’ll talk about these more some time, they all deserve more words.
As for me, it’s going to take time to heal but I am ok now. I hope to heal up well, I realize that it’ll take a while and I need to put limits on myself to keep myself safe and so I don’t set my healing back. These injuries are the worst I’ve had out of a long list of damage I carry.
Right – my right shoulder is screaming at me now, time to say goodnight.
Be well everyone, live your life to the full but keep an eye on the risks you take. Don’t be scared of them, be honest with yourself with them. I found out that skateboarding wasn’t for me the hard way but if I hadn’t taken the session, I would be left wondering what might have been.
I’ve been shaking up my reading habit a little bit this year. I saw a challenge near the start of the year involving looking at reading a book involving every letter of the alphabet. The original challenge was about author names but I didn’t think I could fill all the letters there, so I’ve cheated a little bit (lots) by including book titles as well. I’m up to 19 read so far out of the 26. It’ll be a huge post though writing about all 26 in one go so … here’s a bite size one !
First up though, admin note … I had a “you need to install this plugin to comply with GDPR and the rest” thing appear so I’ve added the cookie notice that you probably see appear. Click what you want there, whether you accept cookies is very definitely up to YOU. I’d like you to accept, because I like to see where my few visitors come from. WordPress is a very money oriented service for the content creator, you get what you pay for and I’m not willing to pay someone for any more than the free stuff. So the only info I see is Country, Pages visited, Referrer clicks and maybe, just maybe … city if I’m quick enough to look at things on Google Analytics.
Hopefully if you accept the cookie, you only need to click the pop up once. Books ?
I actually have to report an abandon. First of the year too. The A to Z has been opening my eyes to new authors as I attempt to fill the various letters up. Some are outstanding, on a level where you find yourself adding the sequels to the wish list for later when you’re part way through the first book. Others are … ok, enjoyed the book but not likely to come back. Some of stinkers.
And I have a cautionary note about reviews too. (Actually as I look at Amazon, I’m seeing different reviews info to what I saw the other day). Low reviews get deleted, high reviews get added out of laziness. Reviews on distribution sites (like Amazon) will be geared towards you buying stuff on their site. I.e. they want you to spend money. I think I’ll be looking at sites like Goodreads as well as Amazon when things catch my eye from the “Hey here’s the list of books we sent you last week, wanna buy them this time?” emails I get.
Oh look, here’s a Goodreads link :-D. That’s for a review of I, Starship by Scott Bartlett which was going to be the I book. However, it became the first abandon of the year because while the central premise of the book looked pretty good and I was vibing with the main character, the selections of secondary characters is bizarre, nonsensical and geared towards conflict that is inexplicable in the set up of that central premise. There’s more info behind the Goodreads link. Oh, it also was getting too close to a few gaslighting incidents I’ve had from previous managers and bosses, which I didn’t want to be reminded about.
I.e. if you’re not enjoying the book you’re reading, definitely move on to the next. I waited to see if one character was ok (at which point the Ship Captain started bullying the MC again), checked to see if it improved via Goodreads and then abandoned … after checking the synopses of the next 4 books in the series. It wasn’t worth sticking with it.
A to Z ?
First up is Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky, as book A. In this one, humanity have started spreading out to the stars and have 3 off world colonies, all of them really harsh and one step off being Death Worlds. (A habitable world where everything is out to kill the colonists). This one is heavily about the politics and organisations of revolution, a thread that runs throughout the book. You see, the colonies are essentially prison camps where those who speak out against the totalitarian regime are sent. It’s one of those fictional universes you really don’t want to live in. But I did enjoy this one. It didn’t have the madcap humour of the time travelling “One Day All This Will Be Yours” but I enjoyed seeing where the story was going to go. Whether the protagonists would come out on top, how they would achieve that.
A good read. Not his best, not the worst. But one thing you can expect from Adrian Tchaikovsky is something new and different with every one of his books. And I do like my variation in my content. (Goodreads link)
My B and I books could actually swap around (including the abandon!). For B, it’s Indomitable by Jonathan P Brazee (Goodreads link actually for book 1). This is book 5 in a series that starts with Fire Ant, the book that the Goodreads link will take you to. This one finishes off the series. It’s not super cerebral deep thought scifi. It doesn’t ask philosophical questions about the universe. It’s fast, pulpy, well written action science fiction set around a main character who is part of a pathfinding group of space starfighter pilots as they attempt to defend humanity from an implacable, enigmatic enemy who always seems to be one step ahead.
It’s inventive. It sucks you in. I loved the main characters. And I bought the series before I got halfway through the first book because I was so invested in what was happening. Sometimes you want philosophy. Sometimes you want to enjoy something where you can turn the brain off a bit and not need to think too much about deciphering what’s on the page.
Fire Ant series – heavily recommend. One thing that’s always worth knowing when you start a series is whether it improves or fizzles as the series progresses. Some fizzle out (like KSR’s Mars books), some build as they develop their universe and story. Indomitable tops off a very satisfying conclusion to this arc in Jonathan Brazee’s universe.
Coming up next we C Beyond the Fringe by Miles Cameron. This is an accompanying book to Artifact Space and Deep Black. These are the two main books in the series, following Marca Nbaro’s adventures from escaping a horrible situation by running off to space. Beyond The Fringe expands the universe by including a series of short stories based around the events of the two main books. Miles Cameron very quickly became a highly rated author for me, as I read through Artifact Space and was drawn into that universe and the characters. Beyond The Fringe was a very interesting second look at that universe from a completely different angle to shipboard life aboard the Greatship.
You’d need to have read Artifact Space and Deep Black really before opening this one but it’s definitely worth a look. And there’s a sense of fun throughout too, which definitely helps me enjoy a book.
One of the objectives of this series / challenge is to find new voices to listen to. D could have been a really lazy pick of Roald Dahl but then Stranded by A K (Amy) Duboff popped up on one of those Amazon emails and it caught the eye enough to check it out more. This one is centred around a pairing of characters who immediately find themselves falling out of space in evacuation pods that have just been ejected from a colony ship that just went boom. They’re landing on what looks like a paradise planet but … it’s also got big scary monsters. And rogue humans too. Will they survive ? What’s on the planet that’s worth blowing up the colony ship for ?
This one kept me guessing to the end and I’m looking forward to steadily reading through this series as books get added to it. Stranded is book 1 and came out in February, book 2 is available and there’s more to come.
That’s one of the strengths of reading and the author community. I follow a bunch of authors on Bluesky and they’re lovely people who are always supporting each other. Us readers will devour a book far faster than an author will write said book. So we need a community of authors writing so we can have enough books to keep our reading habit going. And that author community are always cheering each other on. They understand that they’re not really in competition with each other, they love chilling out with each other and egging each other on with ridiculous memes.
Next up is F for The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear. This one starts off fairly gently, with our protagonist and main character, Dr Sunyata Song, being transported to the edge of the galaxy where there is an impossibly ancient and immense computer construct called the Baomind in a system with a star that’s approaching the end of its existence as a star. Our people need to figure out how to communicate with the Baomind, so they can best establish how to rescue as much of it as possible and relocate it to a star that’ll last a while longer.
It’s the third in the Synarche White Space universe, which is set a fair bit off in the future with sentient AIs, faster than light space ships, lots of mindfulness, a huge variety in alien beings and a lot of mystery along the way. Oh and a sassy lesbian wife, space pirates, teenagers, a space dragon dinosaur … cats and lots of drama going on. You’d need to have read either or both Machine or Ancestral Night, also by Elizabeth Bear, to fully understand what’s going on in here but it’s a worthy addition to the universe.
A safe choice again because I’d enjoyed the other two books in the series. The Folded Sky just came out, if you act fast then you might still be able to get hold of it on a discounted to 99p price …
For G, we have Girl on Fire by Gemma Amor. This one is a new one to me for reading, although I’ve been following along her posts on the various social medias. She’s nice, has struggles but also has the good vibes to pass on. Girl on Fire though is a very angry book. The main character has so much anger inside, she literally becomes a phoenix like person and spontaneously combusts. Not the kind of vibe I’d usually go for due to how I mirror emotions but I was invested in this contemporary fiction book. I wanted to see how the story was going to go and how it would finish.
Worth checking out a new author. I’m not sure that I’ll be back for more due to that anger vibe but this one pulled me in.
Observant people will have noticed I missed a letter … It’s E-zy to do sometimes. The E book amongst all of the other e-books is Off Midway Station by Marc Alan Edelheit. This one is the first in a new series. It’s set in future space and opens with a main character who’s faced with an impossible situation of surviving a surprise attack which has devastated his ship, only for his mortally wounded commanding officer to order an attack which would slaughter thousands of civilian bystanders. And we move on from there to have the first half of this one setting up the universe and the scifi rules of the setting before launching into a battle for survival.
Oh and surprises too for everyone. I’ll be looking forward to checking out Off Javelin Station when it comes out in October.
That’s the thing you really want in a book. To be sucked in and engaged in a developing story with interesting characters and to not really know what’s coming next.
Like I haven’t completely fixed what books L to N are going to be ! Could be Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell, another new author. Could be Last Emperox by John Scalzi. I’d like to go back to Elizabeth Moon, not read one of hers in ages. And then there’s A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nicholls. Or it could be a Larry Niven.
And that’s the thing. There’s a huge amount of stories out there. There are all of the genres, all of the styles, there’s the deep novels and the shallow novels. And they’re all waiting for us to lose ourselves in them for a while.
Time for me to dive into the replacement I book, it’s In The Shadow Of The Ship, a novella set in Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe.
I saw something on Bluesky earlier / overnight that resonated with me … Let’s see. There was someone suggesting that Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein needed to be required reading for anyone getting info science fiction. And I think a bit of saying people didn’t count as being into science fiction if they hadn’t read those particular authors.
Oh ! We need a thumbnail ! Here’s one of mine :
There we go. Good old reading dwagon. (Yes, the knees bend the wrong way. He’s adaptable 😀 )
The most important thing is – reading is a thing we do for pleasure, for learning, for self improvement, for enjoyment. And that goes for fiction, non-fiction, news, reviews, timeline doomscrolling … all of the things. If you’re not enjoying it, find something else to do. I’m in danger of skipping to the close out here too 😀 because I wanna mention the gatekeeping before talking about some very special authors.
There’s an extreme danger in gatekeeping. Like pointing new readers towards the so-called classics like the books from Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. I’ve actually read most of Heinlein’s books. There is some incredible stuff in there, plus there’s also some absolute stinkers. Stranger in a Strange Land is one that gets the attention … I didn’t finish it. I was turned off by the attitude of the characters and the message that’s in there completely washed over me. Yet, I’ve read Starship Troopers maybe 3 times. I read Time Enough For Love quite young … and was unimpressed. Then I read it again later and the characters got to me. It’s a very poignant book.
Oh and then there’s Starship Troopers which is extremely seductive in its message … If you’ve seen any of the films, you’ll see all of the fascist imagery in there, where it’s a satire dressed up as a science fiction alien shooting spectacular.
Things all went a bit weird though with Heinlein as he started weaving together all of his separate stories into an all encompassing multiverse. There are some great books in there, some trash, some you’ll react to with absolute disgust.
Arthur C Clarke was a remarkable visionary but I really struggled with his books. There was a kind of detached sense akin to a lecture. There was a wonderful story and concept going on under there but the writing style was disinterested. And then there was the absolute crime of stuff like Rama II which wasn’t an Arthur C Clarke book, it was ghost written. I managed only 100 pages of Rama II, it just never got anywhere.
I should read some more Asimov. I do have I, Robot somewhere and I enjoyed Foundation a few decades ago when I read that. And then there was Nemesis as a far more recent exploring scifi book.
They’re all very well worth checking out but … they should never be seen as an essential, an entry gate, or anything to with “if you haven’t read these authors you don’t count as a serious fan of scifi”. There should never be a cause for gatekeeping like that. If you like the premise of a book, if the synopsis catches your eye, if a bunch of people give a recommendation, have a look at it. That’s how I’ve selected a few books in my A to Z and it’s been enjoyable finding new voices to read.
The old authors have their place. They’re remembered because they were that first wave of super successful authors (don’t forget Mary Shelley) and were successful because they wrote stories that caught the attention. In their time. We’re in a different time now, things have changed a lot. Those older books haven’t. Some of them pass the test of time, some don’t. But you’ll only know that if you check them out.
Get reading ! That’s the important thing. Lose yourself in those stories. Expand your mind a bit, see if you can learn something new, whether that’s something about people, something about society, something about dreams. Cos we do like to (and should) go for an escape every once in a while.
I’m currently 18 books into an A to Z challenge thing, where I’m looking to fill out the alphabet with books read with a connection to each letter. I’m cheating a bit with author names and title names counting for the letter, the pure form of it just goes for authors. There are a few old classic authors in there, there are some from the last few decades, there are books that have just come out this year.
The key thing is … open your mind up to new things. Go for those new authors. Check out what catches your fancy. Dig into it a bit more.
So if you’ve been enjoying the new Dune movies (I need to watch Part 2), or Dune Awakening, check out the Dune books by Frank Herbert. I don’t consider these the best books (he gets a bit too into his deeper lore) but I think the underlying Dune story is fantastic even if I think the writing is terrible.
If you’ve been enjoying the Foundation series, check out the ancient Asimov books. (I haven’t seen Foundation but have noticed that it’s very well liked).
If you enjoy Andor, consider checking out the old legacy Expanded Universe Star Wars books. There are some crackers in there, especially from Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole.
If you like Star Trek, check out Red Shirts by John Scalzi. It was the first book I read from John Scalzi and it’s excellent. He’s consistently fun and entertaining to read, with a great story popped in there along the way.
I was going to mentioned quite a few more people too. Let’s see !
One of the things you notice from the author community on Bluesky is that they’re all incredibly supportive of each other. They love seeing other authors doing well. And I think a lot of that comes from knowing that us readers can devour books so much faster than they can be written. So us readers can support a whole heap of different authors by buying, reading and enjoying their books.
And it’s wonderful that there are so many varied authors out there who are sharing their vision with us.
We don’t need to go back to the past, there are so many current, recent and new authors who have wonderful stories to tell us. Maybe there’s some in this head as well that want to come out. I wrote a preview chapter a few years ago on the old place … That concept is still in there, it does need time, a story and me being less burned out to make it happen. (Yep, the burn out is still very severe and very real).
There’s also the factory that every time we look back at those old classic authors, we see something problematic emerge from their time as well. It can be very deeply problematic as well. I won’t go into that here (not my vibe) but it can also mark their books, such as what I mentioned with Heinlein’s books occasionally provoking feelings of deep disgust (Farnham’s Freehold). There’s an alternate script for The Motion Picture from the creator of Star Trek which sounds like it was deeply repulsive in how it treated the characters.
There’s some dark stuff back there. And it marks them as a bit “Yep, they had their time. But we don’t go to that place any more because they’re either horrifically dated or … very deeply problematic.”
How am I going to close out this one 😀
The big thing is to keep on reading. Be selective too. If something catches your eye, check it out. Add it to your wishlist, grab it later and see what You think of it. Because that’s what matters at the end of the day. How did You find the experience ? Did You enjoy it ? Because that’s not the same set as the stuff I would enjoy, or what the person next to me or you will enjoy.
Sometimes I like to read something super fast and pulpy like the Jonathan Brazee Fire Ant series. Sometimes I’ll be enjoying something gritty and serious like your typical Gareth L Powell. I’ll go for the whimsical fun of a T Kingfisher. There would be the irreverent stories coming from John Scalzi which are absolute fun. I’ll dive into that very different Vietnamese inspired space society of Aliette de Bodard.
I’m currently in the opening parts of Stranded by A K Duboff, which will fill up the D spot which could easily have been a look back to an enjoyable Roald Dahl. But I’m not seeing anything new with Roald Dahl, I’m checking out a new voice with Stranded. I just finished enjoying reading The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear which is the third in a future centuries space society series.
And then there’s Drew Wagar, who’s stream I’ve got in the background at the moment ! If you like the screenshots and the universe of Elite and Elite Dangerous, Drew’s books add much needed meat to the bones in the games.
I better leave it there :-D.
Read what You want to read. Take the recommendations from people. If you’re struggling and not enjoying the story, don’t feel like you need to finish it, swap to something you’ll enjoy. Maybe even cheat with spoilers too, I’ve made more than one Abandon / Not Abandon decision on stuff in spoiler space. Like the David Weber Honor Harrington books which started in fantastic Hornblower action style but then disappeared into boring espionage as the setting developed. I’d still recommend that series but with the “when the books get boring, stop” health warning to it.
And then there’s Larry Niven ! So many classic books there with that random looking shift coming from the Ringworld saga. That ended very nicely.
Eek ! Like this post hopefully. See you around, back to enjoying Mr Wagar’s stream, with Batkitto building Lego on the laptop, music on the hifi and I’ll crack open Stranded again in a few minutes.
Checking in again ! Has it almost been a fortnight again since last time ?
Before I dive in – this is VERY important. We’ve just had a bit of dumb legislation imposed on us in the UK, which could potentially spread beyond our borders too. It’s the Online Safety Act. If you’re in the UK then you’re affected, please do hit the Petition link and add your signature. It’s a terrible law and it needs to go. Why ? It protects no one, it harms those who need the services behind a number of the adult only sites. For me, it means my protected personal information is now on several third party sites who will almost certainly get hacked and the information stolen. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg with this one, there is so much more Bad in this new law. It’s not a Safety act, it’s an Endangerment act.
I think I left the last post in a bit of a rush. I was looking to get the post out before midnight and the day ticking over. Plus I’d have been running out of the steam between the ears that powers the brain.
How have I been doing ? While I was in the last post, I was suffering from a blocked ear still … I’d had that for maybe a month … I was using ear clearing thingy drops, actually switched from one softener thing to a different softener thing and while it was making a difference, I was still down one ear. It’s quite disorientating …
That was while I was doing the Gromit Hunting at the start of the month too. Gotta do that post ! I’ve managed to see half of the Gromits so far, although that’s been held back by feeling a bit rotten at times, just simply doing other things like massively enjoying finding the lovely MissVadams on Twitch (linky). She’s got a very clear voice, which definitely helped when my ears were bad but also very friendly and just one daft comment from chat or antics in stream away from breaking into that type of laughter that will brighten anyone’s day.
Is also a new catmom having adopted Penny, joining the tortoise Billy who inspired a collection of wonderful Twitch emotes. It’s been a pleasure watching Vic since finding the channel due to a raid in by the also fun to watch FGSquared.
PC stuff ? I came unstuck (or nearly!) a few times with the new PC I talked about last time. It’s a very big unit at 13kg for the case. It’s probably more like 20kg+ now. It’s huge. Which is fairly ok because I’m not going to be moving it around very much. But while I was swapping the cooler in and out all the time in vain attempts to get the All In One Cooler working, that was taking all I had at the time, which is another reason I didn’t immediately migrate over to the new box.
I still haven’t migrated everything over properly yet either. The old PC hasn’t been booted up in a few months now but I have the old data copied over but not sorted into any real sense or order yet. Not quite had the mental spoons to do that just yet.
It has been fun seeing what the new machine can do though …
That’s a mostly static diorama type location from Star Wars Outlaws but the detail there and how it’s brought out by the graphics card is quite incredible. What you’re seeing there is a frame of the big sand crawler vehicle, with textures spread over that frame. They’re then processed to add the depth and to make them look good as a 3d object that you can walk around and see from all angles. Plus there’s the animated characters down there too and the smaller objects in the scene as well. That’s genuinely better than what we would see on movies, such as the originals all those years ago. In earlier generations of 3d graphics, we’d have detail but if you looked close, the textures would repeat over the sides of an object as the systems didn’t have the memory to capture massive detail like what we have there.
Finished Outlaws again, although I need to go back for the second expansion. It’s a long game, fun but feels padded with lots of added optional sidequests. I’ve also been in the Elite world again …
That’s the latest antics, where I’ve taken the brand new megahauler ship and turned it into an explorer craft. That’s the Searching for Rainbows, quite possibly the first Panther Clipper Mk II to visit Sagittarius A* at the centre of the galaxy.
What I call a hole in space in the alt text is Elite’s representation of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The game might be showing its age a little there, although it probably has an easier time with this than it looks from the picture there. The game has very impressive gravity lensing effects, where the visuals of the stars wraps around the big black hole. As you move around the black hole, what you see through it changes dynamically with the angle. It’s very impressive and the static shot doesn’t really do it justice.
That’s been part of the antics in Elite. I haven’t been playing with the alt too much, outside of that speed run, but it’s been a lot of fun tagging along with Ninjaspaceunicorn and Thebigboo with the Hungry Unicorn expedition to the far side of the galaxy and back. We’re on the way back now, not actually that far from the centre of the galaxy.
Anyway, thought I’d better check in. It’s time to post now and read a bit more of book …
I’ve been running an A to Z challenge this year, where I’ve been looking to read something from all of the letters, whether that’s an author or a book title. The latest is The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear, as the F book. It’s the third in the author’s White Space universe, a future science fiction universe where AIs run spaceships that go all across the galaxy. There are pilots, a lot of mindfulness, very relatable people and stories that keep you wondering what’s coming next. I didn’t enjoy Hammered that much (different universe, near future Earth) but I would happily recommend Ancestral Night and Machine.
And I think that’s me about out of batteries for tonight. Not sure what’s been happening there, so many people have been commenting that they’re incredibly tired, far more tired than they think they should be or even would have been a few years ago. I think my tiredness starts from burn out over covid times but it’s gotten worse since.
Perhaps it’s worry about loved ones or could be socio-economic pressures. Covid seemed like a scary time but the world seems a lot less settled now. Like things got a lot more dangerous for everyone while we were distracted by a pandemic.
Who knows. All we can do is look after our people. Be kind. Send a little bit of love out there. Be good to people, don’t default to trying to exploit them. Communities of good, nice, wonderful people are out there, I hope you find yours.
Hi all, first of all … why would you want to do that ?
There are lots of manufacturers and sites that will happily assemble and set up a PC for you. So why would you want to build your own ?
The answer for me is very simple. I get total choice on what’s going into the machine for both the components and the software. I can put a bit of extra money in one thing that I think is important and make a sacrifice in something else that I don’t think will matter. I can future proof without breaking the bank. And probably the most important, it gets set up without any of the garbage software that the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will preinstall that either doesn’t go away completely when you uninstall it or it comes back again. It’s also bundled stuff like the malware that masquerades as branded anti-virus security software.
You could even choose to go away from the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and go to Linux now. That’s more viable, although I’ll come back to that in a while.
The most important thing is to do as much research as possible before you buy. Retails and online sites will be very keen to put discounts on selected models in their range. If you get tempted by those, ask yourself why the discount is happening. Is the discount because they have a stack of stock they can’t shift out of the warehouse because no one buys it ? Or are they dumping stock because it’s just gone obsolete and end of line. I’ve actually taken advantage of that for my last two laptops, they were both acquired on heavy end of line discounts and happened to be specifications that met my requirement.
This is probably the time for … Disclosure note ! All the decisions for the bits here were mine, I paid for everything, the companies mentioned have no idea who I am and no approaches had been made prior to selection of the bits. (Outside of the usual Overclockers and Scan we’ve got your email in our database robot marketing emails)
The catalyst for this post is to introduce the new build PC that appeared here over Easter. It’s the BunnyBox, named for when it was built again :-D. It follows Pumpkin, assembled on Oct 31 2011 and Meltdown, built on the hottest July day of 2019. But the main aim is to tell all of you reading that : You can do this too. Yes. You can. If you can handle a screwdriver and have a fairly light touch, you can build your home brew PC as well.
The key thing is to do all of the research before you part with any money. I have to admit to making a few mistakes with the BunnyBox, some of which were down to not researching properly, some were trusting the reviews a bit too much. Some mistakes and problems were making some bad assumptions. Oh and I may have forgotten to add the system memory to the order and had to hang around Stoke on Trent a while so they could fetch some out of the warehouse.
But the absolute key thing is : It’s YOUR money. YOUR decision to commit to spending it. Don’t ever feel pressured about spending YOUR money unless you’re absolutely comfortable in doing so. That goes for any pressure you may feel to up the spec when you don’t feel that’s affordable or presents value that you’re comfortable with.
Here’s the BunnyBox spec from Partpicker (linky). Partpicker is actually a really decent site to go to when researching the bits that go together to make a PC. They cut their selections down to what’s compatible. So if you choose an AMD cpu, they won’t show motherboards made for Intel chips. When I updated the list for the memory, it didn’t show memory that the board couldn’t handle. So it’s a handy thing to start from to see what’s out there and quickly get a list of bits.
That’s your motherboard, which everything plugs in to. There are different connectors for everything and they only go in one way around, so the only mistake you can make is to press too hard and break something that way. Don’t worry about that. Modern computer electronics are far more robust than when I was a lad too. It used to be that TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) chips would break if you touched them wrong, electro static discharge wrist bands used to be required so you wouldn’t zap the bits. I don’t believe you need those these days. (Please no sue me if something doesn’t work ! 😀 ).
The first thing to go in was a 4TB Solid State Device (SSD) storage device. This is an nVME drive, which is the faster one. It’s an M2 format, which is a small card like a stick of chewing gum. Don’t eat it, too crunchy and expensive 😀
Here comes my first error, because I bought the more expensive one with a heatsink on. Cos … Meltdown’s similar SSD gave no problems in almost 6 years but it did run warm. The mistake was not researching that the board came with its own heatsink. I didn’t need to buy the one fixed to the drive. Oh well, coulda saved some cash.
I bought a single SSD because I was assuming that BunnyBox would be running a version of the Linux Operating System and didn’t know how that handled multiple drives. So I bought a bigger (4TB) cheaper one for significantly less than a quicker one of the same size.
Techie note – you’ll see PCIe, that’s the interface of how the components talk to each other. If you look at a computer architecture diagram, the wiring will connect blocks together mostly with the Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe). It’s express cos it’s the considerably improved Mk2 version of PCI, which first got into PCs in the 90s. M2 SSD drives will show a Gen 4, Gen 5 and if you read this in a few years, probably Gen 6 and beyond. The newer versions offer improved transfer rates which might give you a benefit if you’re doing heavy data crunching but I figured I could save pennies (to go into better other bits) by not noticing going for a cheaper ultra fast drive.
That’s the memory going in. That picture actually shows the stick the wrong way around, because I wanted to draw attention to the notch that’s in the bottom of the stick. That’s a polarising notch and makes sure the memory goes in the correct way around because the polarising notch is slightly off the centre. When it’s in right, the grabby arms to the sides of the socket will do their grabby arm thing and close up. You might need to rest the board on something very solid here so it doesn’t flex when you put the memory in. Use the anti-static bag it comes in between Board and Solid Thing to protect everything.
Something else to note here is the sockets to use. There are 4 on the board there, so I could add more in later. However if you look real close (left side of the socket) and can read upside down, you’ll see DDR_A1, DDR_A2, DDR_B1 and DDR_B2 with a “First” beside them. Processors can gobble up 128 bits of data at a time, however the memory sticks send out only 64 bits at a time. So you double them up to get full performance. But they only work doubled up if they’re in the correct sockets. The board manual will tell you which sockets are best. If you put the memory in sockets DDR_A1 and DDR_B2 (mismatched sockets) then your new PC may not boot up at all.
Pardon the messiness of my bedsheet ! The camera picks up all of the dust and I don’t think I have the hand capacity to edit it out :-D. That’s the box, it’s an absolute unit of a Montech King 95 Pro. The 6 fans there are utterly silent when the machine is on and have the gloriness of already being assembled and cabled in to the box. You might see a bit of ducting below and there is more ducting above. The power supply goes in the back and the motherboard sits on that vertical plate. I’m extremely impressed with this case, it has exceptional build quality, it was easy to fit the All In One Cooler in the box above there and the box can fit the biggest coolers. However, it’s also a massive unit, comes in at 13kg and was a pricey £125. Honestly, with the build quality and 6 included silent fans, probably well worth that.
That’s the power supply going in there. Two things here … don’t skimp on the quality, so extra money went into the Lian Li supply there. I have a few power supply makers on my list of shame, Lian Li is actually a new one for me but they have a stellar reputation. The other is to get a big enough one that it can take it easy with the components in the box. So a 750W supply taking it easy at a 500W draw will last so much longer than a 500W supply straining to consistently deliver the same 500W.
It’s a false economy to go cheap on the power supply. Getting a good name one (like Lian Li) will lead to a more reliable and stable machine. And if it breaks, standards like 80+ GOLD means that it won’t break anything else when it … explodes. Not like a friend’s PC which broke all of its components when the cheap no name inadequate power supply melted. PSUs don’t explode … but don’t take one apart to find out as there is 115/240V in there, definitely don’t mess with the big round capacitors, those are the bits that can go boom.
That’s a modular power supply. The older ones came with all of their cables attached to ends on the inside, so they had a mass of unused cable to hide. A modular supply has those sockets there, so you only plug in the cables you require. Less untidy.
That’s skipping ahead a little to the motherboard installed in the box with the processor in there too. The box there is an ATX format box, with ATX dating back to the 90s. Literally IBM AT PC extended. There are newer formats like ITX out there but ATX has been consistent for decades. There is a sockets backplane on the bottom right and the board is secured by an array of small screws.
That’s an AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3d and BunnyBox has one of those due to a big discount that put it in an unbeatable price / performance bracket. I also have a lot of wariness about Intel at the moment because their quality and part resilience has gone downhill lately due to decisions made by their management.
The installation is a bit different again this time around. That’s an AMD AM5 socket. The lever on the left is for a so-called Zero Insertion Force socket. (It’s not zero force!) You use the lever to allow the socket to open and slide the ickle processor into the socket. Again, it’s polarized with the little dot you’ll see on the lower right corner to make sure you put it in the right way round. When you lower the retaining bracket, the black cover seen previously pops off and the lever then locks it in to place.
We can see a couple of black plastic things there too, every processor needs to be cooled because they’ll kick out a lot more heat when they’re busy. The first cooler this machine had was an All In One (AIO) Cooler by Thermalright. These work by having a heat block that clamps on top of the processor using the hooks on the plastic things above and below. The AIO is then connected to a radiator with a couple of pipes filled with cooling fluid. There’s a pump that circulates the fluid and fans to cool the radiator. It’s a lot easier to install coolers on the AM5 generation of socket than the previous AM4 generation.
That’s everything together ! Not quite, because there are buttons and plugs and lights and sockets to wire up too. The PC case has 2 older USB, 1 new USB-C, a couple of audio sockets, a reset button, a power button and a power light. These all plug into sockets on the board, the motherboard manual will have the where to’s here.
But that is actually it. The graphics card is in there as well. Note how close it is to the processor, I’ll come back to that. Also note how close the memory is on the right there. (Foreshadowing anyone ? 😀 )
The next thing is to take a long solid drink, clean up the mess from any blood sacrifices that might have happened along the way. Depending on the build quality of the components, you might have picked up a cut or two. Cheap cases have many more sharp edges. I only got a very minor cut this time around for the somewhat required blood sacrifice. It keeps the Machine Spirit happy :-D.
Plan A for BunnyBox was to abandon Microsoft and go over to Linux. I attempted using Bazzite Linux, as the reviews and things written about it were favourable. It’s worth checking out Linux, it’s free so you lose nothing but a bit of time in exchange for learning about the alternatives that are out there.
This lasted 1 day.
He he, overly dramatic moment there. The machine actually fired up and installed easily first time but I removed it from the machine because I was getting terrible performance with older games like Idle Champions and Motorsport Manager. The Steam platform is starting to get more games designed for Linux but can also support Windows only games by using the Proton translation library. That wasn’t working so good for me, possibly because the Bazzite install didn’t have the info to allow it to properly use the brand new to market nVidia 5060Ti 16GB I bought. And because I couldn’t see how to install the new drivers, I put Bazzite in the bin and went straight back to the known entity of Windows with a WIndows 11 install.
You live, you learn, you add more knowledge.
So I pop Windows in there, install the Horizon Zero Dawn in there and run its benchmark. All is good. Temperatures go up but it gives a result of 160 fps wibblies which was up from the 71 fps wibblies that Meltdown could achieve. It’s an older game but has a good benchmark for testing purposes.
I then look at the BOINC science sums application and … the temperatures rapidly go off into orbit and as AMD Ryzens do, the machine goes into thermal protection where it slows itself down to around a tenth of its potential performance. This is where the panic comes in. I’ll do a bit TLDR there (this post has gone LONG!) and say that I think the AIO cooler wasn’t taking any heat away from the processor, the pipes and radiator were cold. So I swapped it out for …
Yeah. I went back to what I know and bought the most massive air cooler from a good make that I could get hold of at short notice. That’s a Noctua NH-D15 and while it is a fantastic cooler, I did make a couple of errors when choosing it. The fan there is a massive 140mm, there are supposed to be two but the other one clashes on the memory sticks. The cooler is installed off axis as well, about 7mm above where it should be, because it clashes with the graphics card below.
So while Partpicker will give you a LOT of info about whether everything will fit together, it doesn’t know everything. I don’t know everything. I still make errors like that by (going back to the start) not doing all of the research. I checked whether the cooler would fit in the case … not whether it would fit around the rest of the components.
But it all works, BunnyBox is rock solid so far, it’s an absolute powerhouse running the performance hungry Star Wars Outlaws with no frame drops on very high detail so I’m a happy little bunnydwagon here tapping this post into it.
I think that’s where I’d better leave it before I end up posting tomorrow instead of today. I’ll leave you with :
You got this, you can do it too. Read about what you’re planning to put together, use hardware review sites (like Tomshardware) and borrow the specs from their testing rigs. Learn about the bits and it’ll help you out when you have the screwdriver in hand and assembling.
Take it easy, take your time. Don’t panic if things don’t turn on immediately. Just check that all the wires are where they are supposed to be. Repeat your steps if you have to, measure twice install once that kind of thing.
And compare notes with your local geeky techy community too. We’ll love to gossip about components and tempt people into buying new bits and pieces. Just remember that it’s your money, your budget, stick to those limits. If you’re not sure about what you’re about to do, hold off and learn a bit more. Computer bits only get cheaper and better if you wait.
May your Machine Spirits be contented little beasties.
It’s gone a bit warm here ! Time for another of the look back and catch ups that I need to do.
I bet that’s how it feels for everyone with birthdays at this time of year :-D.
Motor racing ? I always look forward to watching the Le Mans 24 hours race and the Nurburgring 24 hours race. They’re the motor racing highlights of the year for me. The tracks are great and there’s a big variation in the cars and teams to especially spice things up.
Whereas most racing circuits are only a few miles long and it takes between a minute or two to go around them, the Le Mans Circuit de la Sarthe is 13.6km long and the Nurburgring Nordschleife is even longer at 25km long. It takes the current top flight hypercars 3.5 minutes to go around the Le Mans circuit and GT3 cars 3 minutes 50 seconds to go around there. The hypercars don’t race on the Nordschleife, the racing there this year was between 136 cars in 27 different classes. The GT3 equivalent there take just over 8 minutes to do a single lap, with the slower cars taking about 11 minutes for a lap. They start the formation lap twenty minutes before the race is scheduled to start and they cut down on potential mayhem by having three separate starting groups.
There are a few reasons why I enjoy watching this form far more than racing like Formula 1 – one of the biggest and we’ll get this out the way first is that the racing is very honest and there’s very little of the infantile behaviour we see from the Formula 1 circus. 😀 Got that out the way so we can focus on the positives.
Another strength of the endurance racing is just how competitive it is now. Previous years have seen the winning cars form up and cross the finishing line in an arranged formation. They could do that because the cars would have laps separating them not. Not now though ! If you want to skip the results (the races were a few weeks before typing so I figure it’s safe to drop these), please do jump ahead to where I post the next meme. That’ll be the Safe Spot. (Now I have to find another meme !)
Le Mans was a close finish again this year, with the 83 yellow privateer team Ferrari finishing strongly being chased by one of the Porsche hypercars. I think the winning margin was about 15 seconds, with the two factory Ferraris taking it a bit easier behind because they were having to limit the driving because they thought their engines were about to go boom.
We’ll see variation in how the cars do as well in the different conditions. The Toyotas weren’t doing so good in the day this year but were very strong in the night. The drivers race the cars at 110%, balancing that in the knowledge that a small incident can either take them out of contention completely or mean they’re in the pits for a couple of laps getting fixed up. That’ll take them out of the running for a win but they can recover to good points playing positions as other cars get incidents.
Nurburgring was a bit of an odd one this year. The organisers know that it’s not a particularly safe track, with a small misjudgment quickly going from getting away with it to having an upside down or otherwise trashed car. F1 cars and the hypercars wouldn’t be racing here because the run off areas are non existent on a very challenging track. if there’s an accident then it will probably be a big one.
So the organisers would usually heavily punish drivers who broke the safety rules. That didn’t happen this year … drivers were being permitted to keep their licenses to race on the track even after doing things like driving at 160+km/h in qualifying when the track had been closed due to a red flag incident. And that was the winner of the race … Other drivers were doing that as well. I hope we see a reaction next year before we get a more serious incident than the ones this year that leads to injured marshals or drivers.
Because we want the racing to be fast, close and with drama … but we don’t want anyone to be hurt during the event.
Another note there – one of the drivers of the 83 Ferrari at Le Mans was Robert Kubica who was retired from F1 contention after suffering multiple serious injuries (details at the wiki link) in a rallying accident. F1 will turn a lot of its discarded drivers into a joke with a trashed reputation, those drivers will then find their way into endurance racing and proceed to show the world what they can do in a competitive racing car. Will Stevens and Antonio Giovinazzi both started in F1, got quickly labelled as terrible drivers because they were in awful cars. Put them in a hypercar and they turn it into a rocket ship.
And I better emerge out of the spoiler space before I ramble too much 😀
A big difference for the Nurburgring is the vast array of cars that compete there. The main result will be fought out very closely between the GT3 sports cars. There was less than 10 seconds over the 8 minute lap separating the top cars in qualifying. And then there are the multitude of slower, less expensive cars that allow people and teams with less resources to compete and even take the scalps of faster cars that had incidents.
Cars like the humble Dacia Logan, which had been upgraded to have a Renault turbo engine that gives it the potential to be competitive in class along with the Beetle RSR car. I was following a Mini that was racing there too.
A lot of the time, I’ll have the racing coverage on a hidden tab with the commentary coming through and I’ll be keeping an eye on the timing numbers. I’ll be following the Dacia, the Beetle, the Mini and cars that have had incidents climbing the field again after they get patched up. I’ll be saying “Dacia’s gonna get you” as the slowest car climbs ahead of a fast car that’s had something unfortunate (and suddenly violent) happen to it.
The mix of cars and speeds of cars also opens up opportunities for the fast cars to close gaps and get past too. It keeps the racing dynamic and interesting. There’s rarely a dull moment, especially in modern day endurance racing where it’s a series of sprints for the full duration of the race broken up by them having a little breather in the pits while they refuel, change tyres and swap out the drivers. There’s almost always something going on.
Have I sold it yet ?
The two big 24 hour races are both done for this year now, we have to wait until next year for Nurburgring and Le Mans again. In the meantime, there are more World Endurance Championship races to go, sadly behind a firewall. There is IMSA racing in the USA, these races go between under 2 hours to the Daytona 24 hour race at the start of the year. I should watch more IMSA racing again, I’ve lost touch with it.
There’s also European Le Mans and Asian Le Mans series. I should look into these, they’re not something I’ve watched.
But whereas F1 quickly degenerates into something in the background to ignore while I’m reading a book, the hypercar and GT3 endurance racing stays compelling even after the longer duration.
Check it out 🙂
PS Also in racing around … Gromit Unleashed 3 started today, I’ll hopefully find my way out and about around as many of the statues as I can get to. I’ll need the temperature to be a bit less though, 2025 me is very unfit and I’m struggling more and more in the heat. But if it’s cool, we’ll see what we can do. Here’s a link to the old blog with the tag that has the Gromit stories.
Apologies, it’s been a little too long since I wrote anything here last. Now that I’m starting up a post again, it’s feeling good to be tapping the words out again. How come there hasn’t been a post for a while ? Probably a lot of exhaustion there. I realised that instead of being on the recovery from the massive burn out (and probably very long covid) from a few years ago, I’m probably even deeper in that burn out.
Not quite sure how I pull out of that burn out, it might need some more bigger lifestyle changes. We’ll see there. So what’s been happening while I’ve been away ? What’s at risk of disappearing into lost memory because I didn’t write it down somewhere ? Here goes !
Last time I wrote that new PC bits were going to happen. This post is being written on the BunnyBox PC, so called because it was (mostly!) built at Easter this year. I’ve just done a Partpicker list of the bits. There we go. It was a bit more eventful than it really should have been, let’s just say that it’s on :
Its second Operating System;
Its second cpu cooler …
Yep. There was some light drama there … Only light drama though because nothing actually exploded. The Bunny actually benchmarked the same in a game called Horizon Zero Dawn with the non functioning original cooler as well as the massive lump that’s in there now. But I’m getting ahead of things there …
There we go. That’s the gubbins with the big lump of an air cooler in there. Bunny’s story needs its own post really but the TLDR is that I experimented with going with Linux first. That didn’t work out because the performance in games was pretty nasty, probably because the system was working off older drivers that didn’t fully support the brand new to market 5060Ti 16GB card that’s in there. And I couldn’t see how to quickly and efficiently update them. So Linux came off and my 2019 copy Windows 10 went on. And then that updated to current Windows 10 … and finally I’m running on Windows 11.
Actually this really needs its own post before I tell everything in geek level detail here ! The cooler in the picture there is the replacement for an All In One cooler which … didn’t work. Those are a waterblock to take heat off the cpu. Pipes to circulate that heat around, with a pump. And a big radiator and fans to dissipate that heat. It wasn’t taking the heat away from the cpu.
I now have a failed All in One cooler to disassemble so I can see how it works.
I could attempt to return it but … it has 3 good 120mm (big but not biggest) fans on there which I can harvest for the top of Bunny PC. Plus I’ve never had an All in One cooler to take apart before.
What else have I been up to ?
That’s from Lords again and we had a full day’s play in the Interservices T20 games this year. I managed to get there super early, pretty much as the games opened. I got there before the tea selling people were selling tea ! There should be a post about the cricket day as well at some point. We’ll see about translating the “want to post need to post” into having the energy left over to actually get posting. I think we’re doing ok here at the moment. Again, the cricket day is one that should get its own post soon.
Following the cricket was a day spent at UK Games Expo. This was a fun Saturday. I stopped overnight on the Friday but just did the one day and night there. Hotels be pricey. Looking back at it, the event is big enough and crowded enough that it could do with a second day there.
I got loot too ! The dice and tray there are from Trayed and Tested (Etsy link), which is run by the lovely Aby. Good to see them again at UK Games Expo. I also ran into Curlylocksgamer who is enjoying farming in Stardew Valley as I type. Good to meet them too.
And the afternoon was spent with Andy of Billietrixx‘s (Twitch link) community and Billie, browsing the rest of the Expo. Was a very enjoyable bimble with great company. These shows are always best with friends to share the experience with and to point towards the things we may have missed.
No Comic Con this year sadly, Comic Con Friend wasn’t feeling so good so we’ll pick another one to go to. I wasn’t that great either, I probably well overdid it for the Lords trip (Thursday before Comic Con weekend) and needed that weekend to recover as well.
Feel better soon Comic Con Friend !
Better close out now. I’ve been enjoying being able to slam the graphics options up with the new PC. It’s definitely a bit of a beast compared to the last one, which was still going pretty strong. That’s Star Wars Outlaws again, I just ran across this little vignette of Stormtroopers being set the task of target practice. Someone spotted the little critter there looking like it was wondering if it was safer in front of the stormies instead of off to the side.
The game is full of little moments like that. They did a good job with it, although combining the story with randomly generated heist or fetch or elimination missions may extend or pad the game out a bit too much. I’m kinda wanting to be done with it again now. Fun game, maybe feels too long to get everything done. The buildings will be a frame covered by a texture but there is so much detail now in both frame and texture and the graphics cards have the sheer power to turn that complex structure frame and texture picture into a super realistic convincing 3d environment. Says me who will drop 40 hours into a Little Big Workshop run over a couple of real time days. It’s amazing the level of detail in there as well now. The characters will all have full animated skeletons.
Oh I’m not the healthiest with my gaming play profiles ! Little Big Workshop does look much better with the graphics turned up in that too.
It’s been good to pop up again and drop a post in. I have that little few lined up that I need to write words for so that helps preserve them in the memory banks. But for now, back to book. I’m in Off Midway Station by Marc Alan Edelheit at the moment. New author for me, it’s taken half a book to set up his universe but it feels like it’s lighting that blue touch paper to ignite a story that’s going to take off.
To the stars ! Until next time, thanks for reading 🙂
Not sure how much I’ll be able to put into this one because you know I tend to underplay how much things hurt sometimes ? Well I kinda wrecked my wrist and arm so if it starts pain spiking, I’ll need to hit post.
What I am hoping is that my poorly arm has enough in it for building a new computer … What’s up with the arm ? It’s been tending to RSI for I dunno how long now but I kinda crunched it on opening the car door yesterday. Like high pain level plus I’ve apparently strained a muscle in the forearm. So I’m holding off on doing more of the gaming that involves more activity, like the hauling in Elite Dangerous or the Truck Sim games do. I’ve also been looking at trains …
That’s Derail Valley, which is a train driving simulator with its own little area to play in. It’s a curious game, which sees you carrying various bits of cargo from station to station and you can build up what you haul and fix up bigger and better locomotives. There’s a link to Squirrel’s play through on youtube on the last post. But I think that’ll take too many chances with the wrist, so I’ll hold off on it.
What’s happening with the PC ?
Will build PCs for pizza, shiny things or cuddles but especially shiny things
There we go. Pizza is life especially if you’re planning to try and all nighter and can therefore don’t need to worry about the tummy not liking all that cheese.
PC ? We’re kinda being pushed into moving off Windows 10 because Microsoft are ending patch support for it, unless we pay through the nose for extended support. So after October, all those vulnerabilities that let the hackers in won’t get patched. That’s for definite. What I also suspect is that as we approach October, Microsoft will get more and more obnoxious with pushing us towards going to Windows 11 and the paranoid / experienced part of my brain also thinks they’ll push out updates that actively harm the performance of Windows 10 machines. Because that’s what they do.
The answer is to put them in the bin … You probably want to do your own research on this and whether it fits you personally with the level of knowledge and expertise you yourself know you have (and be honest with it too, it’ll save heartache later!). But it might well be worth doing the research on what alternatives are available for Microsoft (and Adobe, don’t forget them here too) products and whether you actually need to stay with them. Let’s see what I do on this desktop :
BOINC science – runs on Linux as well.
Gaming – since Steam brought out their Linux based Steamdeck, far more games are being made available either natively (without layers) on Linux or they run as well or better than on Windows via translation layers like Proton. However, if you enjoy the multiplayer online games like Fortnite and League of Legends, research very carefully whether you’d be able to play those.
Stream watching – happens on a browser …
Web browsing – yep see above there …
Picture making and memes – I use GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) for photo editing, which has a native Linux version.
Also consider that if you have an Android phone, that runs on a Linux version that’s been phone-ified.
So Bunny PC is increasingly likely to be a Linux based machine, which saves £110 which can go towards a more expensive graphics card. And I get full control over the machine, without Microsoft changing stuff on their whim, usually without making sure that it’s actually a positive change.
Enough about the bad bits though, what am I looking at getting ?
The core upgrade will be the Ryzen 7 9800x3d processor in probably another Asrock board. Meltdown’s Ryzen 5 3600 has been rock solid in its Asrock board (after I disabled the overclocking that earned it the Meltdown name), so I’ll stick with that combination. This should be maybe double or the more the cpu grunt that Meltdown had. We’ll see.
I’ll drop 64GB in there (in 2 sticks of 32GB) which is honestly excessive … but it future proofs the machine a bit more. I’d like the Bunny to last at least 6 years preferably more, with the only changes done being graphics and possibly storage. I’m likely to acquire one of these boxes for it :
That’s a Montech King 95 Pro. (Linky to Montech’s site) The advantages of that are the reports from people around the discords who have got one, it’s a very positively reviewed case. Meltdown’s Bitfenix case very nearly needed an application of the Mend Stick (hammer) to allow the PSU to be fitted, because it was supplied with a very small distortion. BAD. I won’t get the case with all the fans (maybe) but that one does have very key features – it can fit a very large air cooling fan, plus the ports are vertically on the front. A bit of learning from this case is that if the ports point upwards at all (Meltdown’s are at 45 degrees), they will trap dust and eventually not allow the plugs to go in properly.
The cooling is another direction where I have my own big opinions there … There are three main ways to go with cooling a gaming PC :
Air cooling – a big lump of metal attached to the processor with big fans to push air over it.
All in one cooling – a small waterblock goes on the cpu and moves the heat to radiators with big fans on to do the cooling. The whole thing would be sealed unit simple.
Home brew watercooling – same as above but this would be a lot more custom, where you figure out the waterblocks, the pumps, the filters, the radiators, the fans etc.
All in one and watercooling are both very well sorted now and I should probably check them out properly at some point but … I see the fans and ask if you actually really gain anything with these ? They’re more expensive, you have to consider the fluid inside (air bubbles get in, so the radiator goes at the top so the bubbles don’t go at the cpu part) and the chances of having a disaster where your expensive gaming PC gets drowned by its own cooling system.
Nah. I’ll just go for a big lump of metal and big slow fans. It’s less complicated, very little can go wrong with air cooling and it’s still very quiet if you go for the big slow fans. It’s one where opinions differ :-D. I go my way, I look at curiosity at those who go other ways, we see what we can learn from each other and mutually hope that we both get many happy gaming hours from our respective rigs.
That’s one for the rest of life too – respect each other’s choices, cheer people on and support them in the direction they go.
Note I won’t be going to a shop for the PC again. I’ll buy off the shelf laptops but … there’s too much potential for off the shelf desktops to have components in from OEMs that I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Or they’ll put substandard components in to save pennies, like an under specified power supply that will explode after 12 months and a day (warranty period) and take other components with it.
Oops, small eek there as I leant on the arm a bit too heavily and nearly provoked a bigger ouch.
There we go – if you’d like more of a look at what I’m lining up to get, here’s a Partpicker list link. The actual bits I get will diverge from that a little, so I’ll transfer the 2TB SSD from Meltdown and its expansion card over to Bunny. Plus I think I’ll transfer the graphics card over for the near term too, because the graphics card market is in a big state of flux right now, so it’s not a good time to buy.
(Plus politics is happening, you see too much of that everywhere else though)
I’m not ordering tonight part because it’s getting late, part because I try and avoid spending big money when I’m feeling the pain at increased levels. The other reason is that I need to transfer over all the data I want to keep to the 2TB drive that’ll go into Bunny PC.
It’s been a while ! I think I needed to dive under the covers for a little while. But first ! We need that thumbnail …
I think the big reason it’s been so long is a steady realisation that I’m probably descending deeper into the burn out, instead of thinking that I’d hit as far as I could go down and therefore the only way was to improve. Nah. I think the burn out is getting worse, if that’s possible. I’m hanging in there but there’s a general shell shocked feeling where I think I’ve retreated back within myself somewhat. Will have to see what I need to change to start recovering and improving. But first, what’s been happening outside of going into the shell for a couple of months ?
We left things last time in the middle of January. A massive highlight for this year was heading off to Megacon at the end of January. This was over in London at the Excel arena and I’d thoroughly recommend checking out this particular convention.
It’s a smaller convention than Comic Con, covering a lot of the same things. It’s perhaps a third of the size, so I was able to get around there a few times as well as just enjoy and soak up the vibes coming from the anime dancing ladies at the Performance Square. There was a lot of joy coming from watching them bounce around their stage. And wonderful vibes coming from the other dancing ladies off to the side, who were bouncing around as well.
It was just a wonderful, happy thing. And then there was what looked like an impromptu mass dance party later on. Amazing lovely happy vibes and it was wonderful to see.
I came away with some awesome loot too. The main reason I knew about Megacon was because I’d seen it on the wonderful Aby of Trayed and Tested‘s (Etsy link) Etsy page that’s at the link there. It’s always lovely to be recognised and a surprise too considering I’d only met Aby once before, at Insomnia 2024. Good to see them again and have a little natter.
The bits there include (there’s too much for alt-text there so here’s the list) :
A dice tray with rainbow coloured dragons flying.
A set of mostly transparent dice with real clouds inside (the d6 was hiding under Eeyore)
A set of larger green dice with yellow patterns and numbers on them.
A leather pouch to hold the dice tray and I keep the dice in there too.
A pink 3d printed dragon from Printing Like Rabbits.
And the Eeyore dragon that I picked up at one of the Welsh castles last year.
I’m definitely a person that mirrors the vibes of the people that I’m around, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. (Happy people make me happy, toxicity frustrates me) It’s why I went back to Trayed and Tested at Insomnia last year and why Megacon caught the eye as somewhere to go. Looking forward to Comic Con later in the year, plus there will be the UK Games Expo the weekend after.
And then there was the day after … I had what I’ll call a health event. I won’t go into details except that there was a decent amount of blood escaping, I should have taken myself off to hospital to get seen to. I’m ok, it was messy but was under control quickly, hasn’t recurred since and I still have all the bits we should have.
But whereas I’d have quite liked to get the Megacon details locked in to memory with a post, that health event is something I’d quite like to delete from the memory. It rattled me for a little while that one.
Gosh, what else has been going on apart from that ? I haven’t been getting out much. I think that’s part of the burn out. I did take a week off a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about going up to the Lake District for a few days. Kinda like the Conwy Castle trip up to North Wales last year, except doing all of the arrangements myself this time.
Is it bad when you’re too mentally done to arrange stuff to help recover from being too mentally done ? Probably.
One thing that has happened since the last post is me doing the Space thing again …
The interest happened again due to the lovely Ninja Space Unicorn (Twitch link) kicking off an expedition in Elite Dangerous to head off to the far side of the galaxy and back. It caught the interest and so I’ve joined in with the streams so far. And they’ve been fun too, including the picture above where the 4 of us that day were all set up to do a buggy race around our landed space ships.
The expedition has been paused for a few weeks now due to IRL Stuff (we lost a friend far too soon) but having fun on the expedition made me look again at the second account I had from a giveaway from a different distributor (Ok it was Epic) … so I’m playing Elite on two accounts now. My main account is still 1000 light years above the centre of the galaxy but their carrier is supporting the alt account build up a star system.
That’s been another big draw, there were rumours at the start of the year that colonisation was coming to Elite. We could claim a system for our own and build stuff in there. Mine’s the Col 285 Sector ZU-L B9-2 gosh that’s a mouthful here’s an Inara link system. There are just two installations completed so far but I should be able to finish two more this week with what’s in the carrier … and then it goes faster from there for a little bit with smaller bases. And if you’ve had a look at that link and noticed something …
Yep. My home station is called Here Be Dwagons. It had to be :-D. And it’s been making me grin every time I go past the name in the list of things in the system. I do have a few more names in the Book Of Names. One will come soon because I have a farm station quite early in the build list. The other big name needs to wait until a medical facility is built. Other than that, looking for some really good names. There could well be a Space Unicorn themed name in there at some point.
Other stuff ? It’s April Fools Day tomorrow, I don’t have anything planned for that … although I did go back to childhood times by acquiring a game called Derail Valley. It’s a train driver simulator. It’s really early days in there for me but I’d point you towards Squirrel’s playlist of the game over on Youtube. He’ll tell you more about an interesting curious game with that progression system inside that you know I go for.
I think I better hit the post and publish button in a moment though … I’ve been keeping the reading going, I lost the reading streak again (oops) but I’ll be looking to do an A to Z of books thing this year. It’s supposed to be authors but I don’t think I’ll find enough variety there for all of the letters, so I’ll go with authors and titles.
Good to post again, I’ll try and not make it two months until the next one !
Have a great evening everyone.
PS Social media stuff ! I’ve abandoned Twixxer (the owner), I keep up to date on Bluesky (the author / creator communities are barmy wonderful fun) and most of the discords I’m in … I’ll post to Farcebook but I don’t keep up to date with what gets posted there (bad algorithm, too much).
Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?
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