April goes Fourth

Hello everyone,

Yep. The “I’m gonna be an Aussie Outback Bush Pilot” was the April fool post for this year. I do enjoy crafting those. Sometimes there’s more production involved for some years posts than others. This year, I kinda got a bit too addicted to Euro Truck Sim 2 so the thoughts of putting a Dwagon in the seat of the truck didn’t happen. More on that in a bit …

Normal blog stuff – really tired tonight. Had a day in the office, followed by wandering around the Mall. Successful for one thing (Magnesium tablet resupply). Didn’t get the other thing, need bathroom DIY supplies. May need new plan seeing as I couldn’t see where what I needed was in the only the biggest DIY store surviving at the local Mall. (Wickes had them. Wickes moved out).

In other news, I got a parcel today (which is why the bin moved). I wasn’t expecting an Amazon parcel … It has my address but someone else’s name on it. Apparently there’s no way to report this to Amazon except by negotiating the customer service bot long enough to get to a number where they call you.

(I’ll hold on to it, hopefully get a knock on the door when they see “delivered to” with a different address on it but if I still have it next week, it’ll go back).

Oh yeah ! Really tired. That’s probably down to hitting the Truck Game a bit too hard lately. Nice things about people time ! I’m glad I had the excuse to watch a ttrpg show (it’s just ending, sadface). It’s being hosted by TheWanderingInn (twitch link). The rest of the cast are :

Amelia Tyler (twitch). Lady of many wonderful voices. You’ve probably heard her around somewhere. She’s the narrator on Baldur’s Gate 3.

PeachyPixel8 (twitch), I don’t watch him much but he brought us a wonderful short and different cyberpunk series called Glitch starring all of the people here plus Valenvain. Less guns, more brain. It was a great little series, hopefully we’ll see a series 2.

Saffypie (twitch). Similar here, not watched much (discoverability can be an issue with Twitch) but her Queen Bitch in Glitch was absolutely stunning and I’m enchanted by her Astrid in Drifting. Great faces, brilliant characters.

Tessachka (twitch). Tess builds custom keeb keyboards when she’s not having fun bringing us the games she can play through a long term hand injury. Lovely lady, check her out. Last seen having fun in Tiny Tina’s Wonderland.

And then there’s the ever lovely Tashnarr (twitch) who guested on today’s episode. She’s been on the Final Fantasy XIV gaming lately and we’ve been enjoying her moving through the story together.

But anyway, on an evening where I was feeling blasted and need something to make me NOT play the truck game (sore arm and elbow too), it was great tuning into Drifting today. Wait, what’s Drifting ? (And Glitch). Gonna have to tune in to The Wandering Inn’s channels to find out :-D.

Ok. April 1st aftermath time. Actually most of that post is true, probably a surprising amount of it. I’m not leaving the UK any time soon, although … the UK isn’t a particularly brilliant country at the moment. The overall Class of the place has definitely gone down. That’s a curious thing actually, we’ve somewhat left the rampant homophobia and racism of the 70s and 80s behind (look up Alan Turing’s fate for worse crimes done by society back then). It’s still there but it’s not quite as bad as then. It’s been replaced with other nasty elements and just Not Smart Stuff. That’s probably the best description of it I have. People got dumb. And rude. And they have new targets for their Different From Us prejudices. We should celebrate differences, not have them as a trigger for abusive behaviour.

I’m not leaving the UK any time soon though. Not leaving the job either and it’s been great being back in a project world I was in about a decade ago. The old knowledge has been reawakening. It’s Pretty Darn Cool Stuff that I won’t talk about here. And it feels like a genuine contribution. I’m not going to say anything about contrast to what was happening before but you can probably guess from my mental state picking up that there is indeed, quite a contrast.

You do have to learn from the past but it’s best not to live there. Be in the present … but spend your energy turning that present into a great future. How can you turn your present into a future you’re going to enjoy being a part of ? The answer there is different for everyone. I hope you all find a fun future to be part of.

That’s been a recurring theme for the April 1st posts. Whether it’s being taken away by aliens, being a Men In Black alien police, coming back to cricket (alas, too broken now) and oh no, I better not check back in the archive for all the April 1st posts … It was fun doing the Elite one. That had my Photoshop GIMP skills from a few years ago, which held up for that one just about. An idea I had for Friday’s post was to add the Dragon in to the truck or plane screenshots. I’m not sure if I could have managed that to satisfaction, it can be really tough to match the insertion to the original especially when one source is computer graphics and the other source is a photograph.

I think the photos and screenshots in there worked for what I wanted. The little pocket LED torch I have is proving its worth … My reading light has yellowed as its burned itself in, which taints pictures. The LED torch is white and I can juggle it as a spotlight and the phone camera (on a timer) to get acceptable pictures.

A light box would be better … but you work with what you have available.

Enjoying games where you trade stuff from place to place – I find myself really enjoying these. There’s a sense of progress and progression from earning the moneys and building up the fleets. The Elite spaceship empire has one of every ship now, so that’s complete. I don’t feel like I have any real objectives or reason to play Elite at the moment. The truck fleet is up to 5 now and that’ll just build and build. One of the achievements requires you to have 20 employees at maximum level, all with their own trucks. So I’m 25% to having the trucks and people for that so far and then they need to learn all the skills. Another achievement sees you needing 10 garages with 5 trucks each and I can totally see me meandering through the game until I get that.

It’s chilled out, mostly non stress (the AI drivers that you share the road with can be a bit nuts) and the visuals are nice. But it was taking a toll on my arms so I’m glad that I had Drifting to watch tonight instead of being in the game. Book later.

Middlesborough – yep. Been there. It was not for the faint hearted like a number of British towns I’ve been through. But it was a while ago so it may have perked up since. Nottingham was where I did university and not feeling safe when walking through the city centre in daylight was a very real feeling. It’s weird that … I’m fortunate that my white male genes make me mostly immune to the abuse and issues that people who aren’t white males get but when people say that they don’t feel safe in the world, I hear you. I don’t necessarily understand wholly due to not being exposed to it as much but : I hear you, I believe you and I’ll look out for you if I can. And sometimes that’s staying up and active on a discord channel when a very scared lady is finding her way home after dark (this happened, she had scare paralysis but we all helped her find the confidence to get home safe).

If you can help someone like that, please do. If only for the “yay me, I did a good thing today” feeling. Although I’ll understand if you have to retreat from it. I’ve been there too, especially over the past few years when the world started going even more scary.

Crewing on a ship – interesting prospect. The physicality of it would need a huge amount of getting used to though. I could probably regain some of what I had when I was legging it around a cricket field but the long term illness I had in the last decade has left a mark on me. Now if I were to win a lottery though, cruising in a barge around Europe is an enticing prospect.

Reality shows like Deadliest Catch, Ice Pilots and Ice Road Truckers – love these. Deadliest Catch might have gone on a few seasons too long though, it’s become very samey over the last few seasons. Ice Road Truckers definitely went on too long, it was good seeing the stories of truckers like Lisa Kelly, Art Burke, Alex Deborgorski, Darrell Ward, Jack Jesse and Todd Dewey unfold. (There’s a big name from the show missing there, it’s deliberately skipped). I gather that the production company upset the trucking companies though, which meant they had to find new places to cover. A pity, because the Alaska Dalton Highway years were the best years of the show.

I would like to learn Flight again though. As mentioned on Friday, space sims have it easy. The flight model is usually translated into gameplay with cheats. Definitely in the case of Elite. And you have full 6 axis control which makes landings and manoeuvres trivial. By the way, 6 axis control is : 3 for moving … Forward and Back. Left and Right. Up and Down. 3 for rotation : Pitch up and down, roll left and right, plus yaw which is turning in place. The trucks are an education because in 30 years of driving cars, I’ve never used a trailer. Trailers turn according to the force put on the trailer by the hook up.

Flight is a whole other order of complication. You have control over the 3 axes for pitch, roll and yaw and the engine applies force in the forwards direction. The wings provide lift to counter gravity … but only if sufficient air is moving over them, that’s the extent of your control over up and down. It’s pretty tough to move a plane left and right though. So flight is a huge challenge, you can’t really brute force it, you have to live within the limitations of the control surfaces having to interact with the air and the physics of drag. So the more you deflect the air, the more drag happens and if you lose more energy than the engine can put in, the wings stall, the plane falls out of the sky and that doesn’t tend to end well.

I’d like to learn it again though, so at some point a dive into MS Flight Sim will happen.

But I’m not about to move to the other side of the world and become a bush pilot any time soon, although … There is a game called Deadstick which is a Bush Flight Simulator game. Looks pretty dead though with the publisher dropping it and development hitting a wall. We’ll see !

For now though, I have that curious contrast between being very tired and being very buzzed. The buzz is partly down to being fully engaged and interested in cool stuff happening at work. Purpose is good. And it’s also partly down to tonight’s Drifting episode being super fun.

Book time now though – it’s an Alex White book, the second in the A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe trilogy. More on that at some point.

Later everyone ! Be well.