Author: Sleepypete

Hello everyone,

I’ve been thinking about doing another music post for a little while and the current events have given me a bit of a theme to work with ! But first … thumbnail pic …

The formerly unnamed Dwagon Rock Band has another member. Actually it’s had another member for almost two weeks now but I haven’t felt up to doing any more on that project just yet. The name is likely to be Chromatic Fever, cos you know … metal and dragons ! May need to draw more colours of dragons and not just the green ones.

Actually, that digression takes me to mention another fella who uses dragons for his avatars, Aavak of the lovely voice that owes a lot to Welsh heritage. Great voice, lovely fella. Here’s a link to his Youtube, which will take you to the rest of his accounts.

But this isn’t supposed to be about streaming people, it’s about the great music. One issue I’ve always had with my music posts is that they always go to the same groups and singers. Like The Cardigans, All About Eve, Bat For Lashes, Tori Amos. Let’s have some different people who are just as awesome.

First up is Seal, who’s song Future Love Paradise was essentially the catalyst for this post when it took its turn on my iTunes. Seal has an amazing voice and he’s an expert at using it. This song is one of his best.

Next up is Massive Attack, a local band to the Bristol area. When I first heard Teardrop as a song (I think I’d heard it on adverts), I thought it was amazing. Pure magic.

Morcheeba’s been a fun band to listen to as well. Sometimes it’s ballad type songs, sometimes it’s more like rap, sometimes it’s lyrics that are there for fun. It’s diverse, it’s interesting. Here’s The Sea, sung by a wonderful Skye Edwards.

You can’t discuss artists of colour without going back to the classics and the originals. Nina Simone’s music will be unforgettable, timeless and always guaranteed to draw on the emotions. And get you singing along to songs like Here Comes The Sun.

And then there’s Aretha Franklin with Respect.

(Are you chair dancing while listening yet ? I am)

Ella Fitzgerald with another classic, Lets Fall In Love.

We have Nat King Cole with more Unforgettable songs. The older singers had a wonderful way of standing there and letting that music flow out for them in just a wave of beauty.

You’re probably noticing that these are tending to be older songs instead of current artists – that’s just me and the style of songs I like. Am old and like the older styles :-D. Nicki Minaj has added a lot to some recent Madonna albums but her usual stuff is too fast, too attack, not calming. So while I have some Beyonce in the library, she’s not someone I listen to much.

Not forgetting those utter wizards with their instruments, Lenny Kravitz had a string of amazing songs on Are You Gonna Go My Way and then there’s the legend that is Jimi Hendrix with my favourite of his, Voodoo Child.

I’m a lucky owner of a Sammy Davis Jr collection as well, now there is an incredible voice and apparently an even better dancer. This legend’s song can only be Mr Bojangles. Oh and The Impossible Dream which I remember first from when it was adopted for a fantastic Honda advert.

You have to mention Michael Jackson here too for his innovative contributions to dance and dance music. Smooth Criminal is a classic.

Moving on to Prince, who was a brilliant singer and an even better songwriter. You’ll have heard his songs sung by other bands and singers including Sinead O’Connor, The Bangles, Kiss, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Kate Bush … Here’s When Doves Cry.

I love Roberta Flack’s voice as well, here is the original Killing Me Softly With His Song.

I’m gonna finish on Seal again because he’s just so good. Another topical one to end on, Don’t Cry.

Actually no – this is the perfect song to close on. It’s Louis Armstrong with What A Wonderful World. Because despite all the trouble and strife, this is a wonderful world to have you, yes you reading this, in it.

Stay safe, be well and I hope you enjoyed these wonderful songs as much as I have while collecting them together. There are so many more songs too … but only so much room in a post. Find them, enjoy them !

Hello again,

I’m in a bit of a “not quite sure which game” at the moment. Sometimes that’s because I’m not getting on with how some of the games play, sometimes it’s due to the latent RSI injuries that have been with me for a while now.

And then other times it’s because I get mysterious sudden twinges in my upper body ! Some definite random ouchies happening lately. Need to get out and about when conditions are right again. I need a thumbnail pic …

There we go. I did a Space again. I’m figuring out ways and means to get the better screenshots again. Some of the EDSM waypoints will take you into the heart of nebulae like the one above … but in that case you’re surrounded by colour or the nebula is too big to take in on screen. So what I was doing yesterday was seeing how far off the nebula I should be to get it all in one shot. I think that one worked.

Before I go much further though, check out this video from Wanderbots : Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The bundle itself is at Itch.io at this link. There are only 9 days to go on it so it’ll be gone around 16th June (for those reading this later wondering why the link doesn’t work!). It’s a bundle for 742 games at a minimum of $5 cost. And from a quick scan, there are some crackers on there like Oxenfree, heard lots about Night In The Woods, Overland, games that catch the eye like 2000:1 A Space Felony.

I’ll probably sign up for that bundle as well over the next week.

To the spaceships ! I mentioned setting up for another Core speed run earlier in the week and on Friday afternoon/evening, I thought I’d go for it. Probably a good thing too because I’ve had a weekend of not feeling great mentally. I dunno, a mixture of tired (which doesn’t feel like it makes sense) and a lak of focus with not feeling like I want to throw myself into doing Stuff like doing a little more in The Outer Worlds.

So … to the Core ! The competition rules say that they want a picture at the start with the system clock on it :

There we go. A start time of 14.48.00 GMT. The challenge was to try and get there in time for ordering pizza, so a target of under 4 hours to get me there before 7pm server, 8pm UK. Pizza didn’t happen though because I didn’t feel like ordering it after I finished ! (Quick addon – here’s a link to the Frontier Forum post with more details)

One thing I noticed quickly was that Tea and Medals was running not just cool but downright cold ! Apparently the Dolphin ships are a bit unbalanced there. It meant I could start the hyperspace charging extraordinarily quickly which chopped some time off the run.

A big difference this time around was that I was using the Neutron Star Highway and the jump plotter at Spansh (link). What that gives you is a set of waypoints to follow on your way there :

(click for more readability and oh look more tabs in my secondary browser window …)

You pop in your origin and your destination, give it your jump range and how far off a direct line you want to go and it’ll give you the list of waypoints. Sometimes going off the straight lets you take advantage of more neutron boosts, which is important because a boosted jump takes you 4x the distance of a normal jump and you’re not always jumping the full distance because you can only jump from star to star. So if there aren’t stars conveniently placed apart at your jump range, you have to take more hops.

A couple of stats :
80% in the Dolphin plotted to 167 jumps and the other ranges were 152 jumps at 50%, 163 jumps at 60%, 154 jumps at 70%, 184 jumps at 90% and 476 jumps without deviating from straight (100%).
I think Warp Factor Potato (aka Tea-89) was capable of 51ly jumps, which worked out to 229 jumps at 80%.
Tea and Medals did the run in 3 hours 19 minutes 36 seconds (including a game crash in the middle!) and 183 jumps at an average of (25,900ly / 183) 141.5 light years per jump. You have to add a few extra jumps and pauses in to fill up the tanks because you can’t refuel at the neutron stars as well as on the spot repairs.
Warp Factor Potato took 6 hours 7 minutes over 411 jumps at an average of 63 light years per jump.

Being able to take longer hops leads to less jumps than you’d expect, although the Potato’s run was using the in game jump plotter with barely any reference to the Spansh plotter.

Enough stats, back to the pictures !

I may have been taking a few more liberties as well … If you look in the bottom right, there are two lines under “Fuel 1.61/h”. The top one is a reserve fuel tank for in system travel, the bottom one is fuel for the hyperdrive. You really shouldn’t be getting that low … With that amount remaining, I probably wouldn’t have been able to jump to a different star. This just needs a little planning though … In this case, after jumping through a series of neutron boosts, I selected a star to jump to that I knew I could fuel at.

Another condition is that you do the run in Open Play, where you’re in with all of the other players. I’m normally sticking to Solo.

And there we go ! Dropping out of hyperspace at the entry to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. You should be able to make out the edge of the photon sphere eye around the blackness. One of the other conditions for the race is that you take a picture of the galaxy map when you arrive. This has a system clock time on it :

There we go. And …

A little bit of posing that’s gone on my Inara page. I didn’t stick around though, I still had ponderings of pizza.

Stopped at Explorer’s Anchorage overnight, which is just a couple of lightyears out from Sagittarius A*. I could pick up a planetary rover here for the trip back. I didn’t have one for the trip there because it drops a whole light year off your jump range, which is a big hit.

First stop was a system only 0.79 light years away from the big black hole. It’s the white fuzzy dot above my ship’s nose. (Not that one, it’s just above the top of the ship). I had a call for more math … what’s the gravity there ?

From a previous post, acceleration per solar mass is 1.327 * 10 ^ 20 / distance in metres squared.
(the 10 ^ 20 is how many zeroes are added – in this case, 20)
Sagittarius A* is 4 million solar masses so that pops the number up to 5.308 * 10 ^ 26.
You pop in to the system at 61 light seconds, or about 1.8 * 10 ^ 10m.
That makes the gravitational attraction at that point equal to 160,000 g. (divide acceleration in m/s/s by 10 to get g)
0.79 light years is (0.79 * 9.46 * 10 ^ 15m) 7.47 * 10 ^ 15.
So the gravitational attraction at my landing spot is a fairly minute 7.1 * 10 ^ -5 m/s/s or 7.1 micro g. That’s just under 1000 times of the Moon’s gravity on the surface of the moon. But ! Depending how I read what I’m looking at now, it’s either double or 20% of the Moon’s gravitational influence on Earth. If that planet rotates and had water, it would have tides from Sagittarius A*.

Just wanted to work that one out :-D. Science is fun.

Finding Pretty Space Things is also fun. This is the Hypio Orb Nebula. I’ve started naming the screenshots immediately so I have a reminder of where they came from.

One of the ongoing memes with Kolo is the tendency for the surface scanner to stop at 89% (if it hits 90%, that counts the whole planetoid as being mapped).

And there we go, view from the surface.

That’s it for me for today. Not sure if I’ll be gaming (I’ll open up The Outer Worlds shortly I think) much or just enjoying more of Fleet of Knives in a series by Gareth L Powell.

Stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone,

I am currently between book … I know. The horror ! I think it’s going to be another one I haven’t read yet, Fleet of Knives by Gareth L. Powell. It’s the sequel to Embers of War which I felt took time to get going … but was a worthy read.

I mentioned A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe in one of the discords the other day too, that one had a great combination of spaceships and magic within. I’ll be reading the next in line of that after it goes on sale again. (If you’re not in a rush to buy stuff, wait ’til it gets cheap … and then you can buy more for less !)

Oh ! Good news.

Bookbarn is opening up again in a few weeks. Hopefully that’s good news and not something happening too early, considering virus ! Their cafe won’t be opening up again just yet though.

(I should note at this point that I just spent a minute or two asking Google for “cute dragon reading a book” for the thumbnail before realising that I’d drawn a dwagon reading a book)

Book !

I finished reading Thrawn by Timothy Zahn last night. This is a prequel book, set in the Star Wars universe again. The timeline probably stretches around 20 years, between the Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and it follows two Imperials Thrawn and Eli Vanto. A third recurring character pops up later.

An interesting book, especially in these times where racism and prejudice has become so visible again. Thrawn is an alien, of the blue skinned, red eyed Chiss race. He was first seen in Star Wars books for the 3x Heir To The Empire books, where Grand Admiral Thrawn is the main enemy protagonist. He’s a master tactician and strategic genius and this book sees him rise through several scenarios which steadily bring out that genius … and how the Empire around him reacts to it.

The Empire is not quite as bad with the racism as our world currently is but the prejudices shown by the human Core World citizens are a recurring theme through the book. It does this extremely well. You have Thrawn as the alien being subjected to the treatment, not totally understanding it at first … and you have Eli Vanto who knows exactly what’s going on, being an educator to both the reader and to Thrawn.

Oh and there are shenanigans going on throughout and because it’s Timothy Zahn, who has a fantastic grasp of what you can get away with in Star Wars, the situations are totally believable. (Unlike certain recent movies !)

If you’re interested in the expanded Star Wars universe books, I’d totally recommend this one. The Heir to the Empire trilogy (and later Spectre / Vision books) have been wiped away from Star Wars canon but this one remains, courtesy of Thrawn appearing in Star Wars Rebels. I’ll read the Heir to the Empire books again at some point, they are far superior to the new movies in terms of story.

Tea and Medals ?

After markedly increasing the credit balance with the internet spaceship known as Grabnarr, I was looking for something a little different again. The above ship is the Tea and Medals, a Dolphin class passenger carrier exploration ship. That picture was as she was being fitted out …

Before travelling over to Galileo Station in orbit of the Moon …

Poised and ready for another speed run to the galactic core. I’m hoping for a 4 hour time for this run and that’ll be aided by a 20% higher jump range and I’ll be using a different way of plotting the route. I.e. I’ll be making much more extensive use of the Spansh neutron star jump plotter (link). For the Cobra Mk3 run, I only made about 5 course updates, trusting to the in game jump plotter much more. This trip should be more like 180 jumps.

Spansh says 167 jumps with a bit of wiggliness (efficiency to 80%, 60.7ly jump range), that would be 476 with the direct route … Neutron star boosting helps a lot. I’ll be targeting 180 jumps for the trip, although it’ll be more than that. The neutron stars allow you to jump 4x the distance … but you need fuel which gets scooped from main sequence stars (like our Sun).

Tea-89 took 413 jumps with a decent amount of neutron boosting along the way. I did like Tea-89.

That might happen at the weekend. The speed run has to be done in one shot, so I really don’t want to attempt it after shutting the work laptop down for the evening. It also depends on how my hands and neck are doing too … they’re not really happy with me at the moment.

But I’ll survive there. Just means more excuses to read books instead of playing games !

Stay safe, be well.

Hello everyone,

Scary world being scary at the moment … I’ve been seeing what’s been happening, reading and listening to the various people and thought I had to Say Things.

This is important. I have that loose rule of not talking about politics or other -isms but I thought I should break that one this evening.

There’s really scary things happening at the moment, not just virus related ! I’m very privileged. I’m a white male from a good background. I can walk the streets with very little fear. I rarely have to worry about suspicion that I’m up to no good. I can be out after dark on my own with no fears of being molested.

I am utterly shocked to the core when I hear that people will be subject to Stop and Search because of the colour of their skin. I’m devastated when ladies report how scared they are to be in situations where they are alone and a group of men suddenly appears. I don’t have to be cautious with my body language when it comes to seeing people in enforcement, in case a sudden gesture ends up in an altercation.

What’s terrible at the moment is the amount of racism (and many other isms) there is in the world at the moment. Our differences make us strong. They should not be something that sets us apart. And it’s been going on so long, the shock factor has gone out from it.

We are no longer surprised when we hear that someone of colour has been shot or otherwise lost their life in a situation that should most definitely not have arisen. Like Breonna Taylor, the lady who was asleep in the apartment she owned when she was murdered by Police. Like George Floyd.

That’s a terrible, horrible thing to contemplate. It means the -isms have gotten so deeply enrooted in a rotten society.

And that’s not just America. It’s over here as well with the bias in Stop and Search, in Windrush. It’ll be in other countries too. It’s probably in the country that you live in. Perhaps not as visible … but I’m always sad when I see similar situations being reported in other countries.

People have been responding to the Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter. And they do. My life matters to a few people. Your life matters. It matters to me. The lives of my family matters, the lives of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. All of you matter.

But the Black Lives Matter cause is the important one at the moment and it will be until something changes. Until I heard the stories, I had no fears about traveling on public transport alone. I had no fear of being stopped and searched or thought of as a gang member up to no good. I can own my fancy car without someone thinking I stole it.

A person with black skin has to think very carefully about doing all of that and has had to for the last few hundred years.

That’s wrong.

And now we hear the tales of how the Police over in the USA are handling the resulting protests. You’ll have seen those stories as well, I’m not going to repeat them here except to say that it’s not just over the top, they appear to have been inciting escalation as well.

There is no accountability.

I’m no particular fan of my own privileged background. I believe we should all be judged equally according to our merits on a level playing field. I don’t see my background being the thing that opens the door. My knowledge and skills should be what does that. Similarly, I hate to see doors being shut for people on the basis of their colour, gender or upbringing.

We all have our own -isms. What we have to do is look inside ourselves. How do we react to other people. Are we giving them that level playing field. Have we assumed something that we shouldn’t have, like do we think their merits are based on gender, orientation or colour.

I know I have my own unconscious biases that affect my thinking. You will too.

I could go into a few cases from my own life but the end thing of that is while I have helped in the past, I can help better in the future. We can all do better. None of us are perfect, we should always see if we can improve.

Like meeting someone at their place instead of a meeting halfway which would mean they’re going to be walking the streets after dark. Yep, could have done that instead of hurriedly arranging a different meeting place (I like to give people the chance to rely on themselves – self reliance is very important). Like standing up for the lady at work who was being bullied (situation resolved now) but my honest thing there was that I was in a deep concentration tunnel and was completely oblivious to what was going on over the other side of the divider.

There was an incident where I was having a meal with someone in an open air place and across the way were two youngish men having a bit of a handbags fight. This was making the person I was with incredibly nervous. What I should have done was told her quietly that I was keeping my eye on what was going on, I wasn’t going to do anything that provoked an escalation, I was trusting the (very beefy) security guy to control the situation and my last resort would have been to put me between her and them. I think saying that would have done a lot to ease her anxiety. I stayed quiet. I’ll say something next time.

What happened in the past though isn’t important though. You can hold up a flag and say “I helped there !” but that’s not enough. It’s how we go forward, that’s what counts.

Help people.
Support people.
Ditch your -isms.
Recognise difference as strength, not a root for your insecurity.

I think I’ve run out of steam there. Back later this week with something more like normal service but I will leave with a couple of things :

If speaking up makes you anxious, stay quiet. I’m seeing a lot of “If you don’t post with us, you’re against us” at the moment which I am vehemently opposed to. Some people are very anxious about speaking up because it can make them a target. I don’t want to be a target and I bet you don’t either. People who know you should know you well enough to know where you stand on issues like these, without having to shout it from the rooftops every time a cause comes along.
If you can change things by voting, PLEASE VOTE. Things like this don’t happen on their own, they happen with direction from above. Get someone in place who will hold these people accountable.
Offer support, not judgment.
Judge people on who they are, not what they are.
Be calm, not aggressive.

Stay safe, be calm, be well.