Author: Sleepypete

Hi there,

Another day another meme and this time it’s scifi shows on the telly … Bit of a late post because I’ve been catching up after going in to Motorsport Manager again for a little while tonight !

I’m pretty sure I’ve done this one before not all that long ago but even though it’s an older meme it still checks out. No Star Wars in here though because a) haven’t seen The Mandalorian and b) other scifi is just better … Although the Clone Wars animations were actually pretty good.

So – Top 10 in no particular order except for how they pop out of my brain.

Firefly ! It had far too short a run and was ended well before its time. There were many more stories to come from the universe of Firefly as well as Serenity and her crew. It was fun, tense, interesting, emotional and you never really knew what was coming. It didn’t always go the way of the crew although they usually found a way to come out on top.

Next up is Doctor Who. This has been a highlight for pretty much all of my life and a fair few people in the UK would say that as well. At least those who watch the show. It’s perhaps suffering from script fatigue again but apart from rolling out the old enemies time and again, there’s usually some handy variation in each series. Enemies like the Family Of Blood, the Mummy Child, the stories where the Doctor and People have to recover an impossibly lost situation.

They’re still doing ok with it.

Star Trek is another I grew up with and the choice here will be incredibly divisive : STAR TREK DISCOVERY ! There. I said it. Best Star Trek ever. HA ! The various other series had their highlights but they also had inconsistencies and just plain filler. DS9 had the best arc … hid it behind Ferengi filler. ST:TNG mostly predated story arcs. Voyager … best of the rest. TOS was also incredibly inconsistent. Enterprise was messed about with too much. Picard is … good but feels stretched and is just going over old well trodden story arc ideas. Discovery is just better.

Why Discovery ? Because season 1 was a masterpiece in setting up story arcs early and with immensely impressive subtlety. There were things set up in the early episodes that didn’t pay off until right near the end of the series. It was interesting, mysterious and extremely well made. Season 2 wasn’t as strong but Captain Pike played by Anson Mount was a huge, huge highlight.

Wait. Wrong Gene Roddenberry invention.

Next up is the universe of Gerry Anderson and I’m going to go to Captain Scarlet here. Why that one ? Because you never knew what was going to happen in that series. Usually the main characters win. Not in Captain Scarlet, sometimes the Mysterons would win. And the various series were very well made too, in their own style. It’s a shame Space 1999 didn’t get the scripts but UFO was a fun one too. Thunderbirds managed to inject far more drama into a puppet show than anyone would have thought possible.

I really enjoyed Farscape too. If a series ends its run with you jumping out of your chair and shouting NOOOO at the telly, it’s done something right over its run. I’d never done that before or since. It’s the story of an astronaut who is flung through a wormhole into far off unknown space and then brought on board a ship full of escaping mismatched convicts. Will he survive ? Will he find his way home ? This is also the series that introduced the amazing Claudia Black.

The list that inspired this has The Prisoner on it. A favourite choice of a fair few. I watched this a while ago and was wondering what was going on with it. It challenged so much around its time. Possibly too clever for its own good but very well made and the questions it asked are still relevant today. Perhaps even more so in this time of plague and isolation.

Battlestar Galactica old series. Yes. This was daft and silly. But it also had drama mixed in with the fun. Especially original Starbuck. This was probably the first attempt at doing a long running plan for a series. So much of the special effects were reused, over and over again. Didn’t matter. The modelling worked great.

Popping in a Blakes 7 too. This was made in the days when BBC were still getting away with actually being a bit subversive.

I loved the ship, the Liberator, partly for its just plain silliness in how it looked. The design appeared in games too later. When it originally came out in 1978, I was definitely probably too young to really understand what was going on with this series. But I loved it and it almost certainly set me along the path to happy scifi addiction.

Last one to write (cheated a bit with B5!) about is The Expanse. This one is set in a reasonably distant future where humanity has spread throughout the solar system. There is no Space Magic, outside of the mysterious stuff from forerunner species. It’s a series about the people again. I did like the character of Miller and I especially identify with the pilot, Alex Kamal, probably because that’s the part I’d see myself playing in that universe.

I’ve read up to book 8 and watched the first 4 series. The telly version is probably better than the books, because it’s cleaned up some of the messier aspects of some books that were probably too drawn out. On the other hand, the books get a chance to breathe more with a timeline that lets the story have a chance to tell itself. I’d thoroughly recommend watching the books and reading the series. Or is it the other way around. I’ll be reading the books again after the series is complete.

But the last and best in its time has to be Babylon 5.

Not just for the 5 year story arc that introduced a new universe, built the scenarios and then exploded into a most spectacular epic. No, the big strength of Babylon 5 was in the characters. The interplay between Sinclair and Garibaldi. Pretty much everything Garibaldi did. And G’Kar. Humble Zack and Dr Franklin. I’m mentioning all those who were played by actors who are lost to us now but the rest of the cast were amazing too. Like Sheridan and Delenn. Ivanova is a legend, Lennier was as tragic in his own way as Londo. And there has been no character more alien than the enigmatic Kosh. All of them.

Babylon 5 will be my favourite for quite some time just because of those characters and how they amplified how good the story was. It looked incredible for its time as well. Work of genius.

Other mentions to :
Stargate – Atlantis. Not SG-1 because O’Neill is actually kind of a scumbag in that series overall. Universe was curious but was infected by the grimdark scifi trend.
The Mandalorian is supposed to be amazing. But I’m not intending to sign up to the Baby Yoda Channel to watch it.
Battlestar Galactica new series. No. It gets most of its core ideas from the 1978 series. Its thing was to expand upon that but … it started up the grimdark phase of scifi which I was most definitely NOT a fan of. It also spectacularly lost its plot after New Caprica and the writing massively suffered after that.
Dark Matter was one I was massively enjoying … but it also got cut off before it really kicked off. Perhaps they took too much time to get to that point. Perhaps it would have been worth it.
Ulysses 31 – an animated series that was doing the long series arc even before Babylon 5 brought that in … Need to watch this again. Actually, most of the animated series were doing the long arcs before they came to normal telly.
Space Above And Beyond – I was immediately caught in this one from the very nicely done pilot. However, it was another one that didn’t get the chance to tell its story.
Defying Gravity – again, lovely setup but stopped too early.

That’s it for me ! Sleep well, be safe and …

Nite !

Hi there ! The screenshots are from Elite Dangerous. Hope you're enjoying RDR2 🙂

Not to sound too oblivious here, but are the spaceships shots from a game? RDR2 has claimed most of my gaming attention for the last year, so I can't even guess what SF titles are popular right now!

A meme ! I used to post a fair few of these but haven’t seen suitable ones to steal for a little while, or I’ve just plain missed them. Until today !

Here goes !

1. What is the colour of your hairbrush? It’s a yellow comb.
2. Name a food you never ever eat? Bananas and anything that’s been near cucumber.
3. Are you typically too warm or cold? Too warm. I struggle to dump heat.
4. What were you doing 45 minutes ago? I closed the work laptop just over an hour ago, 45 minutes ago I was lurking in 2 streams. Fuzzyfreaks on the laptop and Xaliiah on the desktop. Xaliiah‘s just getting started again in streaming.
5. What is your favourite chocolate bar? Mini Eggs and big Toblerones. That reminds me ! I have a big Toblerone that has not yet been opened.

Oops. It has now been opened.

(pic note – be very careful with anything chocolate like given to animals, it may well be toxic to them)
6. Have you ever been to a professional sports event? Several. If the Interservices T20 games count, that’s the last one. They’re professional at other things though, not at the cricket. Otherwise, it’s Wembley and football.
7. What is the last thing you said out loud? I just mumbled “Hmm”. Can’t remember actually, I’ll often unconsciously talk out loud if I’m thinking through something.
8. What is your favourite ice cream? Mint choc chip.
9. What was the last thing you had to drink? I currently have coffee.

10. Do you like your wallet? It is my wallet. There are many like it but this one is mine and it does the job I want it to do and hasn’t fallen apart yet. This is good.
11. What was the last thing you ate? Erm … I may have discovered an unopened Toblerone but it is nearly dinner time so something involving chicken soon.
12. Did you buy any new clothes this weekend? Erm … nope ! I started my isolation early.
13. The last sporting event you watched? Live ? Formula 1 testing and I think that’s one of the last sporting things that’ll happen for a bit.
14. What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? Buttery popcorn ! But the health people have pretty much shut that down in GB so it’s salty popcorn for me as a preference.
15. Who is the last person you sent a text message to? The Sleepysister.
16. Ever go camping? Not for a couple of decades but I was contemplating whether it would be the option for the eventual Le Mans 24 hour trip.
17. Do you take vitamins? My diet sucks so vitamins and Magnesium tablets it is.
18. Do you go to church every Sunday? No.

19. Do you have a tan? My friend who donated this meme answered : “IN the UK in March?!!”. Seconded.
20. Do you prefer Chinese food over pizza? Pizza is better. But the Chinese is within walking distance and has someone where who likes to sneak extra prawn crackers out to me.
21. Do you drink your pop with a straw? I’ll use a straw if it’s provided but normally no.
22. What colour socks do you usually wear? Black, although I’ve been varying the socks I buy because it helps to match them up when they come out of the laundry.
23. Do you ever drive above the speed limit? No. I got trained out of doing this by old cars that could be favourably described as bangers. If you went too fast, something would drop off them.
24. What terrifies you? People being hurt by my actions, especially if it was a conscious action and not something I didn’t realise was bad. Particularly pertinent in this time of virus lockdown.
25. Look to your left. What do you see? Laptop with Fuzzy playing Mount and Blade on it.
26. What chore do you hate? Pretty much any type of cleaning !

(usual thing applies with copyright – I raided this one from Amazon. I don’t think they or the seller owns the copyright and I have no idea who does. If you recognise this, please let me know so I can attribute and link)
27. What do you think of when you hear any Australian accent? Hello Mr xxx ! We have an Aussie on the team, he’s a good guy.
28. What’s your favourite pop? Something something coke/pepsi related.
29. Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru? I’ll sit in their place and munch it there. I rarely take food away from them.
30. What is your favourite number? Not sure I really have one ! Although I avoid letting prime numbers if I can.
31. Who’s the last person you talked to? With voice, it was a fella called Jim. In text, it was a prescription of tea as the lovely Xaliiah was wrapping up her stream.
32. Favourite cut of beef? Medium rare steak.
33. Last song you listened to? Little Light of Love from The Fifth Element soundtrack.
34. Last book you read? Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and I’m in the first quarter of Ignition! now.
35. Favourite day of the week? “Any day I am not at work.” Same, same.
36. Can you say the alphabet backwards? Yes. But … w.w.w.why ?
37. How do you like your coffee? In a mug. Also warm and milky.

38. Favourite pair of shoes? Probably my work shoes at the moment ! They’re good shoes. The fuzzy cold weather boots did me well too, although they were a pain to put on.
39. Time you normally go to bed? Not until midnight and then usually a bit later.
40. Time you normally get up? About 7am ish.
41. What do you prefer, sunrise or sunset? Depends if you’re having to drive in to either. Driving in to low sun is a pain.
42. How many blankets on your bed? Quilt only.
43. Describe your kitchen plates? Orangey with a pattern on the outside.
44. Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage? I don’t really drink alcohol much at all. White wine is what I’d mostly likely to be caught with.
45. Do you play cards? Very little. There are a selection of competitive card games on the computer now but it’s not a genre I tend to go in for much.
46. Car colour: Shiny and Red.

47. Can you change a tyre? Yes. I sadly don’t have a spare though, I’d be using a repair thingy which essentially destroys the tyre.
48. Your favourite destination? Places with interesting things to see. Comic Con is always fun, although I think it’ll be delayed this year. Lords for the IST20 is always a good day out and I enjoyed the semi random outings like Raglan, Legoland and SS Great Britain. Need to find some more places to wander around when the lockdown finishes.
49. Favourite job you’ve ever had? Probably the first long term one in my current organisation. I was able to learn, absorb knowledge and see something amazing taking shape. The current one is pretty good too and I’m hoping things I’m seeing and analysing will lead to changes that will improve the final product.
50. How did you get your biggest scar? Most of the damage has healed but there are still leftovers from the long term skin condition, so this is probably : An infected bite.

One last picture before I hit post. I found this while looking for another and really, really want an excuse to use it :

Haha ! As far as technology goes, I’ve had to abandon attempting to stream sound to two separate Bluetooth devices from my laptop. It can do it … but the Bluetooth device stuff was starting to crash and otherwise have issues. It hasn’t had a problem since I stopped using the Bluetooth speaker, so I’m assuming that sending to two devices was over working it. Which means I need another solution for the music !

So you’ve seen the news by now probably …

GB effectively on lockdown, mostly due to the attitude of the Nutter Brigade who took yesterday’s sunshine as an excuse to get out and about and the response is the most stringent restrictions on movement in this country in living memory.

I’ll be ok. I have food for at least a week, we’re still allowed to go shopping for food and I’ll top up after a few days. I’m expecting the shops to be absolute mayhem tomorrow with another wave of panic buying. Nobody wants to be a part of that. Oh wait, Nutter Brigade will be out in force.

I’ll be working from home for the forseeable future too. That’s ok too although it’s going to have an impact on what I’ll be doing.

Enough of that though. I was going to add in a jokey thumbnail pic but I don’t feel like this is really a joking matter any more. Despite what it might seem from the last few paragraphs, my mood is ok. I have a bunch of people who I can natter to about all this stuff, I can get on with Stuff, I have way too many books and dvds to keep my attention and I was happily going WOOOOW at the internet spaceships today … The acid above is more a case of “I’m not mad, I’m just very, very disappointed.”

Internet spaceships ! I left things yesterday on a planet with a dim sun on the horizon … Check out how I ended up today :

Beautiful right ?

That’s an Imperial Cutter named Tiamat’s Chariot and I’ll be finishing this route of astronomical shiny places to visit in that ship. There will be some amazing pictures to come I’m sure.

Found a ginger planet along the way too.

Went through a small nebula area …

And then I was close enough to the populated areas and their shipyards to trade up the ship. She is really shiny isn’t she ?

On the way out of the station for the first time there.

She’s a pretty one but a big lumbering beastie too. Definitely not one to be going around the galaxy in either but the rest of this exploration trip is all short trips, which should be all good and then the beastie gets refitted as a heavily armed trading ship, taking supplies wherever they’re needed.

That’s it for tonight I think. I’ve vented about the new measures. I don’t like ’em but the Nutter Brigade has made it happen.

Internet spaceships can be super pretty and super shiny.

Stay safe out there, be well and if anyone reading this is due to work in a food shop over the next few days, I don’t envy you one bit. I hope you get the protection that I think you’ll need.

See you all later in the week. Virtually 😀

I thought I’d do a little bit of testing today.

Before I do though – Happy Mothers Day to all the Moms out there ! Sleepymum called earlier, she’s ok and is enjoying the flowers that came through via non contact “just pop it down there please” type protocols.

Bandwidth ?

There is a story going around at the moment that an EU individual has asked the video streaming service people to tone down how much bandwidth they use … and that they’ve complied (It might start tomorrow).

The idea is that people watching Prime, Netflix or The Baby Yoda Channel are soaking up the bandwidth that’s needed for emergency services. I’ll get back to what I think of that later.

There was another story about online gaming people taking up the bandwidth too. I thought I’d test this …

First up is Twitch streaming and the lovely Kaeyi this morning doing a stream of the new Animal Crossing game :

This was after roughly an hour of 720p streaming, which goes at a steady 3ish Mbits/s. An hour was 1.542GB. For this activity, the compression and video encoding is done on the fly, so it isn’t as effective as when the encoding has more time. Fuzzy’s stream at the moment is in 720p as well and it’s going at about 6Mbit/s over on the laptop.

By on the fly, we mean that it’s pictures and sound being captured at the source, encoded into a video stream and sent over the internet to multiple viewers in 0.95 seconds between my laptop and Fuzzy currently. That’s … pretty impressive.

Next up was Amazon Prime, with 46 minutes of Star Trek Picard :

So that’s 2.332GB in 46 minutes, correcting up to the hour makes it 3.04GB or double what Twitch were doing for that Animal Crossing stream. This is for a video on demand service and it looks like a really inefficient one too. Prime’s quality isn’t up to the next candidate’s quality. This is shocking actually, for a service looking to send out prerecorded video to millions of people, it should be as efficient and high quality as possible.

On to Youtube and an Aavak video on his latest Rimworld colony. Youtube tends to skip up and down on quality, depending on whether you’re paying attention. This was a 1080p video, running for 50 minutes :

There we go, 709MB for 50 minutes or 850.8MB per hour. Youtube video from people like Aavak looks pixel sharp, especially when compared to what Prime were pushing out. It’s packaged up (rendered) for efficiency by both the viewer producer and then by Youtube as well.

And Aavak makes good videos too. He has a lovely Welsh accented voice that’s a pleasure to listen to.

As does the Fuzzy One and Nerina Pallot who is playing on the iTunes at the moment.

Last one – gaming ! I did a 3 hour session on Elite earlier and the stats came out to :

There we go … 216MB for 3 hours, or 72MB per hour. That’s probably a low level in terms of what traffic gets generated by multiplayer games. As you bounce from system to system, the game and servers will figure out what’s there and send the info back. The Elite Dangerous Market Connector application is also sending information back and forth on what I find. There’s been minimal contact between me and other pilots though and no voice comms. That would have boosted it a fair bit.

Voice comms won’t be that much higher though. Voice needs a fraction of the bandwidth that is required by video and you can chop the quality back a lot before you lose the ability to understand the person on the other end of the cable.

The big reason is that the coordination in the gaming world is done by data, not by pictures. The game system will send across detailed information on what the entities in the game are doing and then the highly detailed environment is generated from that. I’m thinking that it probably resembles a list of chess moves. Player 1 is at x, y, z pointing a certain direction going a certain speed. Update that often and that should be what’s needed. You don’t really need to keep sending across the detailed information on what they look like.

Just like Elite won’t send across pictures of the space stations as you orbit around them, it’ll send across the design info which maps to the graphics toolkit I suspect they have and then the local game does the grunt work.

And then the game makes it look super pretty.

So what’s the point of the testing ?

We’re in a time where we’re being asked to stay at home and be isolated. We’re not really that set up to do that psychologically. Humans are very definitely herd people. Even us introverts like being on the outskirts of a community. We also need things to keep our minds busy.

Sure, if the emergency services need to take control of limited bandwidth, let them do that. I suspect it would be very easy for the Netflix’s, Amazons and Baby Yoda Channel people to flick a switch and stop the video watching.

But we need our entertainment to help keep us sane. Keep the tap on until it is required to turn the tap off. Say NO to people who need to look as if they are having an impact on the situation, especially when that something is ill conceived, not thought out and more than a little daft. Slowing the video feeds or turning off the online games takes away a reason for people to find their entertainment from within their little bit of isolation. People bored because they can’t play FIFA over the internet are more likely to go for a kickabout in the park.

It’s dangerous. And it’s another precedent.

That’s getting near politics though, which I try not to get in to here.

I’m preferring to do my sightseeing in game (rather than outdoors around people).

It’s been interesting staying in my little isolation place.

May need to click and zoom in a bit for the name there.

And another cheeky sunrise for the landing.

To close – keep doing what keeps you sane ! As long as it’s paying a healthy respect to this virus that’s going around. I’m hoping not to leave the house for around a week now. I’ll be doing the work from home thing, keeping on with the online games (and the offline games), watching the streams and a little bit of video watching online.

Might be an idea to keep the dvds and blurays in reserve in case they do have to cut the Net/Prime quality down a bit though.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Addon – just seen this on the Twitters :

Click for the text.

Keep playing games, dust off the dvds, stay at home, be well.

I acquired supplies today !

Normally that doesn’t merit a headline but these are odd times we are living in.

Yeah, it’s a bit modest but I’m not going to be panic buying far more than I am ever likely to use or even be able to store. My fridge is actually nigh on full at the moment.

I’m planning to be doing a fair bit of working at home over the next few weeks, which started on Wednesday. I was in today but to be honest, because most people are working at home, it was almost like an extension of the work at home isolation. I suspect there may actually have been less people per square metre than there are around me at the moment at home. (They’re just in the houses of the neighbourhood, safely isolated from each other).

Anyway, Tuesday saw me do a little bit of stocking up and the Horde had already gotten there before me. Most of the shelves had been emptied and not just of the headline stuff like toilet roll, I was surprised that items like multivitamins, milk and chips had disappeared too. And lots more too. There weren’t any iced buns either. Or chicken and mushroom pastry thingys. I like those. The things in the picture above were things I wanted to acquire on Tuesday but had been cleared out. Or they are things I don’t usually keep in the house (bread and milk) but the being at home thing calls for them now. They had 4 pint milk things too but I didn’t think I’d use all that. Responsible hoarding !

Things have hopefully settled down a bit since then, or people have already completed their panic buying sprees and are now locking themselves away. (They aren’t locking themselves away – as demonstrated on mainland Europe where draconian measures are being introduced).

I could say rather a lot about the situations occurring at the moment but I suspect you don’t want me joining in with that, you’ll be seeing it pretty much everywhere you look at the moment.

As far as it goes for me though :

I have supplies;
I can work at home very easily;
I haven’t shown any symptoms (although I am suffering from allergies and dust!);
And I’m more scared of passing on anything I get than I am of the Thing itself.

The dust inhalation is partly due to :

Hello thing. Thing is on the way, although it’s an older model Technic set which means that instead of going through a numbered sequence of bags, all of the bits are in all of the bags and you have to dive through them all looking for the bit you want. I do like Lego but it seems to kick the dust up when I do it.

It has suspension, steering and a rear drive at the moment, engine might well go in next.

I know what you’re thinking there – there’s an easy fix to there being too much dust in the house :-D.

I’ve also been doing the Internet Spaceship thing again :

Black hole !

More black hole !

Doughnut aisle that got too close to a black hole !

Apparently the Horde does not have a taste for custard doughnuts.

And a little isolation in the internet spaceship. I’m getting close to civilisation again there, only about 25k light years to go and quite a few waypoints with pretty things at them.

Be well everyone :-).

Hello everyone,

Things are still being weird out there aren’t they ? I’m ok but I’ll be working at home for the next couple of days. I did a shop tonight and couldn’t believe how much the place had been hit by the Locust Horde.

But enough about that – I bet you’re seeing far too much about What’s Occurring from other places and you want a place to get away from it. How about some books ?

After a good while missing diving in to the books, the Canada trip gave me lots of excuse to dive in to them again. I had finished Embers of War before the trip but not opened up another book since.

The first book to be devoured was All Systems Red, of the Murderbot Chronicles by Martha Wells.

This one is written completely from the perspective of the Murderbot, who hasn’t got a name (can’t remember it) outside of calling themselves Murderbot. They’re a cyborg mechanism that acts as the security guard for a group of scientists surveying a planet. It sets off at a pretty smart pace and, with a few suitable interludes to let you catch your breath, keeps rocking along quite quickly too.

There is a lot of what’s going on inside the Murderbot’s head and you never really lose track of what’s going on. Murderbot likes to think their way through the situation while the inner narration explains what’s going on to the reader. That situation rapidly develops into one where Murderbot and peeps end up in extreme danger and funnily enough, what Murderbot would actually quite like to do is get back to devouring copious amounts of entertainment video.

An intriguing book and I’ll definitely be back for more.

Oh – the setting is medium distant future with humanity out among the stars, attempting to not be eaten by various hostile fauna. The tech involved in the story is very believable. It’s advanced enough to have artificially intelligent combat robots but it’s still grounded in a certain limited reality that doesn’t depend on pseudo reality stuff to make it work.

And then we have Tiamat’s Wrath …

I can’t say too much about Tiamat’s Wrath by the Expanse people, James S.A. Corey. It’s book 8 in a series that will be 9 books long, so you can imagine how much spoiler potential there is here.

I think what I can say is that there is plenty of space based shenanigans going on. There’s character development. There’s new people. There’s old people. There’s old new people. There’s new old people. And there’s all the other shenanigans going on, both at the scale of people and all the way up to the scale of solar systems.

It’s a spectacle of a book that bodes well for where the series continues to go and I will most definitely be coming back for book 9. I am very intrigued as to how they plan to end the series. I was most certainly glued from start to finish and it did very nicely for the second half of the flights there plus the evenings at the accommodation.

Next up was Big Ship At The End Of The Universe by Alex White.

This one most definitely dove whole heartedly into Space Magic. Indeed, it depended upon it.

It’s set in the medium far future again, where humanity has well and truly spread itself around the stars and gotten comfortable enough to go racing. Somewhere along the way, humanity has evolved a whole new organ or sub organ in the brain, which is a source of magic. Mechanists can dive into machinery and computers. There are life mages, shield mages, sniper mages, analysis mages … and more.

It was a genuinely interesting and very different world to be in, with Boots and Nilah being fun characters for the book to be centred around. There’s the dashing racer and the old cynic that play off each other and it works oh so well for the book. There are a host of other characters too and you actually genuinely care about how they’re getting on. At least I did when I was reading it.

It doesn’t pull its punches with how hard some of the effects hit, the tech of this world is very definitely set up to win the fights and things like the Geneva Convention have been thoroughly forgotten about. There are machines that slice and dice people, neurotoxins for lunch and a massive conspiracy going on. It’s a dangerous place and our heroines throw themselves at it fully as they launch in to an epic treasure hunt …

I’ll definitely be back for the next book in the series too. Alex White created a very curious place to base his stories in.

Last one for this collection is Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (technically, I haven’t finished it yet but there’s only 3 chapters to go).

This one is set in probably more like the near future. Humanity is in the stars … although Earth only really knows about this from a comfortable distance. As our story starts, our central character is contemplating signing up for the off world military.

There is an on planet military … but in this story people above 75 years old get a chance to join up for the off world Colonial military, which then can lead to a life in a body freed from the ravages of their 75+ years so far. However, there is a cost … they can never return to Earth. As soon as they leave, they are essentially dead to Earth.

How this is done is something I’ll leave to readers of the book.

There is a bit of Space Magic in here but it’s stuff that’s done well and it makes the story rattle along nicely. Some books try to rationalise what they are doing behind the scenes. I think the best books just summarise that as a kind of Space Magic. The character chosen for the narration trick isn’t going to understand, so the exposition in the novel doesn’t attempt to either. It works and gets the Space Magic out of the way quickly.

What’s more important are the characters, what they’re going through and what they’re thinking. And this is a book that’s really rough on its characters. And that’s done well too, with John Scalzi’s trademark sense of off ball humour making them human and offsetting that roughness.

This is another one where I’ve bought the next book in the series (ok, it’s on sale at the moment) before finishing the current book.

A good set of books ! I think the next one is likely to be a fact book, an overdue Ignition.

If you are having to face a period of being shut in for a while, I hope you have something to keep you entertained and a good book is excellent for that.

Be well everybody.

Hello everyone,

It’s still getting scary out there isn’t it … Here’s a Happy Place :

Lego Shop – Cardiff. I was over there yesterday afternoon for various reasons.

Didn’t actually pick up any Lego though …

Let’s see – what’s been occurring since Wednesday ?

The big reason for heading over to Cardiff yesterday was to pick up more drugs. Yeah, I could have picked them up more locally but … local Mall’s got kinda boring now hasn’t it ? Cardiff has more interesting places and better shops.

It’s been curious watching the news over the last few days. I have to say our government needs their collective heads examined after the reckless Thursday announcement that they were going to be happy that more people acquire this virus that’s going around. It’s accelerating too. And it’s been curious that so many event organisers have announced postponements pretty much immediately after the government announcement. It’s almost like they were waiting for official word before deciding what to do. (Liabilities will have had something to do with that).

That’s about as far as I want to go in to politics though. It was distressing to see one person’s story appear on a discord yesterday where his girlfriend was in the hospital and slipped in to a coma. Hopefully they pull out of it.

For me – I’m still fine … although I’m nervous about it. We have an away meeting coming up on Wednesday next week and I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea as something to travel to. Maybe that’s me being overcautious. Our place is a bit of a melting pot of plague as well because even though we have valid work from home facilities, people probably don’t switch to them quickly enough. We haven’t had an official announcement yet. Or rather we have … but it’s been another head in the sand no decision keep calm and stay as you were announcement.

I think we may have to call off the Mother’s Day visit weekend too, although I’ll talk to SleepyMom before making that decision. I know a few other people have called off attendance at events because they have to look after older relatives. They’re essentially self isolating already so that they can stay in their smaller group of contacts.

Internet hugs are still good – right ?

So – Cardiff yesterday. The catalyst for it was my body starting to tear itself apart again. I think my external woes over the last almost decade ran down my levels of various minerals to critical levels and one thing that’s manifested as is brutal cramp. As in heavy cramp in my leg that led to hobbling until yesterday. Leg’s ok again now. I must have slept awkwardly on Wednesday night too because my shoulder decided to freeze up. That’s mostly ok again as well now but it’s kept me out of the internet spaceship pilot seat for a while.

It’s been minimal gaming today as well – there’s a Caledorn Pathfinder video going on another stream and I’m looking forward to lurking in Tashnarr’s stream later when she starts up. The Pathfinder game feels like one I might enjoy playing, eventually. I find it confusing to play games while watching a playlist of videos of them.

Hopefully internet spaceships tomorrow. I kinda want to get back to the bubble pretty soon so I can get into different ships again. The next one is likely to be a Krait Mk II for mining … although I might actually do mining in a smaller ship. They changed one of the mechanics of the game such that if you do industrial scale mining of the most lucrative and flood markets, the markets give you less money.

I’m missing the sport. This weekend, that would have been Formula 1 and I think it was going to be IMSA and WEC’s Sebring races. But that’s understandable, especially as the McLaren mechanic’s catching of the virus may well have coincided with the Barcelona test and there may well be more people out there unknowingly carrying it.

So – drugs … when my Magnesium tablets ran out, I got the wrong ones. Instead of 3 a day for 80% RRA, they were 1 a day for 67%. I think the 1 a day, taken in the morning, meant I didn’t have much left while attempting to sleep … hence cramps over night. Today was ok on the new regime.

(Don’t use Dr Google as gospel, if I’d still been getting cramps, I would have gone back to a proper doctor. I was just lucky right this time).

Yesterday also saw me heading around the sweet shop – I now have emergency sherbets and kola kube supplies. I also found myself in the book cave and picked up 2 by Alastair Reynolds – Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Hopefully I read those in the right order. I also picked up HG Wells War of the Worlds because although I’ve seen a few adaptations, I’ve never read the originals.

I almost did cinema too but that was a victim of bad timing – Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot seems to be the only semi interesting film (except 1917 – that’s very good but I saw it already) on at the moment and I’d have missed the start … and then it would have been super awkward to escape Cardiff after.

I think that’s it for now and this post …

Be well, be safe, be wary of the risks out there at the moment.

Time for book I think ! Currently in Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, although that’s been put aside while I’ve been doing other things !

Addon … OH ! One last thing. People have been posting the “Support your local merchants” and there’s another for “Support self employed con people”. Special mention here for one Scorch Lady – link’s over to the right.

Before the event got moved, she posted that she wasn’t going to Birmingham Comic Con. Artists and traders like Scorch must get a lot of their income from events like the comic cons and that bookmark there is a lovely bit of work.

I’ve been bouncing around the Internet Spaceship galaxy again …

That’s a black hole … and the galaxy. More of that later …

In real life stuff, things are getting a bit more scary no ? If you are worried about what’s going on, you’re in a good place. It’s ok. I’m right there with you on it. I think the situation will develop further as time goes on, then it’ll hit a plateau and start reducing again. But in the meantime, keep being wary of it, take your precautions, don’t be silly about it and I hope you and your people will come through this ok. I suspect that Comic Con Birmingham will disappear, that one is 9 days from now. I reckon London Comic Con at the end of May is probably 50:50 at the moment. I think the Lords day will still happen … but that’s an event held at a wide open stadium, not something in a closed in exhibition centre.

I had a mission accomplished last night from the shopping trip. I was out of Mini Eggs so had to indulge the panic of running out to get more. Also acquired loo roll because that was a due purchase. Looks like the locusts had hoovered up most of the loo roll but they’d rolled out a fresh pallet of the stuff … sorted. The thing of 4 will keep me going for a bit. I was feeling as if I was being judged for having my loo roll in the trolley though.

May also have acquired more popcorn and a big Toblerone.

Internet spaceships ? As the thumbnail (and the title!) suggests, I’ve been getting braver with the black holes …

That one was rather pretty. The game lets you get pretty close to them and I got curious enough to do a little research on what we’re seeing there.

You’ll probably already know about the Event Horizon, the point at which even light cannot escape. This is also known as the Schwarzchild radius for non rotating, uncharged black holes (simple ones). If you were to pack our Sun into a size smaller than its Schwarzchild radius (I’m just gonna call this the S Radius), it would become a black hole. Our Sun’s S Radius is 2.95km. That’s not very big … (The radius of our Sun averages as 696,000 km).

The stars you see in the picture that look like an eyeball globe is the Photon Sphere. This is at 1.5x the S Radius. The game lets you approach to maybe double that. It doesn’t let you get any closer than that and depending on the size of the hole, the ship starts getting hotter. The small black holes are the best because you can orbit them quicker.

This one was stunning. The orangey/yellow type thing in the background is actually the straightness of the Milky Way ribbon bent around the black hole by the gravitational lensing. You can also see the lensing within the photon sphere. At some point, I’ll do a video because the screenshots don’t do justice to how the lensing folds and unfolds as you approach and …

Retreat.

I’m curious about the gravity though, so if you don’t mind I’m gonna think aloud through the numbers for a minute … The Gravity equations is :

The Gravitational Constant is known : 6.674 * 10 ^ -11.
Mass of Object 1 will be our black hole. For our Sun, that’s 1.9884 * 10 ^ 30 kg.
And we can ignore Mass of Object 2 because :

To calculate the Acceleration, we divide Force by Mass, which means Mass Of Object 2 cancels out.

So big number time : Acceleration per solar mass = 13.27 * 10 ^ 19 / Radius in m squared. (1.327 * 10 ^ 20)

That makes the acceleration at the Schwarzchild Radius of a 1 Solar Mass object =
1.327 * 10 ^ 20 / (3 * 10 ^ 3) * (3 * 10 ^ 3)
By the way, you can cheat with the powers of 10. Multiplying them adds, dividing subtracts, so that works out to 1.47 * 10 ^ 13 m/s/s. Or about 1,500,000,000,000g. 1 g = about 10m/s/s (actually 9.81 but that needs a calculator and I’m lazy!)

Going out to 10km reduces that to 1.327 * 10 ^ 12 or 132,700,000,000g.
25km makes that 2.12 * 10 ^ 11 m/s/s or 21,200,000,000g.
1000km is 1.327 * 10 ^ 8 or 13,270,000g.
696,000km or the current surface of the Sun is 2.74 * 10 ^ 2 or 27.9g. Phew – wiki agrees.

I do hope this math is right. Either way, you’d want pretty strong engines or Space Magic to keep you out of the black holes at that range.

That’s a considerably bigger black hole … and my 4th trip to Sagittarius A* at the centre of the galaxy. Sagittarius A* is estimated to be 4 million Solar masses and its Schwarzchild Radius is 1.187 * 10 ^ 10 m (11.87 billion km). It’s chunky.

I think that’s enough math for one day.

I found this place while on the travels, attempted to join the dots. Need brighter ship lights.

If a star isn’t big enough to collapse into a black hole (our Sun is not, the threshold is about 2.17 stellar masses according to Wiki) after exploding, then it may crush down into degenerate subatomic particles. As these squish together, a neutron star may form … or pulsar. In the game, these have streamers running off of varying levels of violence. The one above was pretty gentle and the idea is to run the streamer just long enough to super charge the jump drive so you can bounce huge distances between stars. For my current ship, that takes the range from 65 light years up to 261. Neat for crossing vast distances quickly.

And they look rather pretty too.

I found some planets along the way too, here’s a water world. These seem to be generated a fair amount by the game.

That one is an Ammonia world.

Another black hole, this time with a star behind it … or maybe in front. Or behind me and the lensing has turned it all the way around. This one was from today and it’s the GRS 1737-31 black hole, coming in at 48.2 solar masses giving a S Radius of 142km. The game let me approach to 185km, which was closer than I predicted, that Photon Sphere should have been at 213km.

But … alas, my hand was starting to complain at too much probing of the dark holes so I called it a night not long after visiting GRS 1737-31. I found a curious canyon system :

And a good place to settle in.

Nite all. Apologies for me letting the geek out in the middle there :-D. Wait. Sorry not sorry ! 😀