Author: Sleepypete

Gosh, it’s hot this week. As in really hot.

Yep. Hot. I think I picked the perfect week to take some annual leave, although maybe not the right week to build a new computer … It’s been a bit toasty for doing more than loafing about drinking lots of water.

But still, new bits arrived on Tuesday after a little bit of Cardiff wandering on Monday. Let’s actually talk about Cardiff first. I like Cardiff, there’s lots to look at including a few curious book caves. The following appeared and escaped with me :
Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
CJ Cherryh – Chanor’s Venture
Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park
Larry Niven – Tales of Known Space
David Brin – Existence

A few in there that I know should be really good, a few which are speculative. I still need to finish 2312 … and you know that more will appear during a Book Barn raid in a few weeks.

I also went a little mad acquiring albums with albums from Aurora, Mike Oldfield (x2), Tori Amos, Vangelis, Jade Bird and Lorde appearing. Also sherbets and bonbons. Cardiff is a good place.

Computer ? Here we go. This’ll include an honest critique on some of the bits that appeared, because I will immediately replace one and may well replace another as well.

That’s the box, a Bitfenix Nova case and is the candidate to maybe be replaced. A box swap is a big job though so inertia may help it survive. Why don’t I like it ? It only extracted a light blood sacrifice (a cut about 3mm long, nothing) but it’s just too small and doesn’t off enough space for fans or for air to escape. We’ll come back to that later.

There was also a small distortion in the corner where the power supply fits in, which must have been the result of a fairly major dinting in the factory and should have made it a quality control reject.

That’s the inside of a very empty box … It’s just about big enough. The mainboard goes in the top and there’s a fan there to extract hot air. The power supply goes in bottom left ….

There we go. Corsair make good power supplies.

(Disclosure note – there is no sponsorship of any kind here !)

That’s the motherboard, which everything fits into. It’s an Asrock board, following the Asrock board that did pretty well for me in my last machine.

The ports are at the top left, the little square at the top is where the processor goes and the 4x sockets to the top right is where the memory goes. The longer slot in the middle is where a graphics card will go. Everything else plugs in around the edge, including disc drives and the lights on the case.

That’s the processor installed under the stock AMD cooler and the 2x sticks of memory are there too. The label saying “Crucial” in the lower right is a 500GB (actually 470GB) M2 SSD hard disc and then there’s the back plate laying loose on top of it all.

You get 2x sticks of memory instead of one (cheaper) big one because the machines are capable are using double the bandwidth of just one stick, which makes them faster.

And that’s the gubbins in the box. And actually the last proper picture in this series too. The hard discs go over to the right and graphics in the middle. One of the tricks is to manage those power supply cables such that they don’t block the airflow and I couldn’t really tuck them somewhere out of the way in this box.

This all actually took a hell of a lot more time than the builds usually do ! It was incredibly hot on Tuesday. Literal sweat dripping and other nonsense like that. It should get a bit cooler from tomorrow.

The next thing to do is to connect the leads and switch the power on and ….

Uhoh. No screen. My keyboard is a little awkward so after plugging in its other USB plug (it has two), I reboot and find “Windows did not start up correctly” followed by the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death.

Oh crikey no, that’s really bad news.

Zombie PC. Actually not that bad though because the machine was attempting to boot off the most ancient hard disc which was from 2x machines ago, instead of the Windows 10 older SSD. It fired up nicely after switching the boot order around to the correct hard disc.

What was worrying though was the temperature. I’m pretty certain that I have the cooler installed correctly but ….

That’s the readout from a hardware monitoring desktop gadget from Addgadgets that I find really useful, getting its data from Core Temp. A steady 53 degrees C on idle is far too hot for comfort, even in these temperatures. You’ll see the graphics card below hovering at 35 degrees C. It’s not in any danger of melting down, the machine has survived a quick SETI (Milkyway at Home) stress test topping out at 83 degrees C but that sawtooth pattern to the temperature is worrying. It really shouldn’t be doing that and I think the machine was derating itself as well during that stress test. What it all means is that you won’t get the full performance out of the machine, it’s liable to crash when worked hard and you’re unlikely to get the 8 years of life out of it that I got with the last build.

(This is why that hardware monitoring gadget is really handy – it lets you spot and diagnose issues like this, including if the horror of horrors happen – a failed fan).

The temperature is hovering between 53 and 66 degrees C at the moment but it was on a nice and steady (as in, a line and not a sawtooth) 73 while playing Motorsport Manager earlier.

So I’ll be heading to the shops tomorrow when it’s cooler to acquire a new … cooler. I also need to get a new Windows licence because I’ve changed too many bits now. I’ll still be able to use the other Windows licence in the old machine.

I haven’t transferred over the bluray drive yet. I think that might be a dead’un although I need to verify that by finding an opportune evening to watch Rogue One.

How does it perform ? I used the 3d Mark benchmarks on the old machine before switching and on the more stressing Time Spy demo, the numbers went from 3500 wibbles to 4100 wibbles. I think that’s graphics card limited. On the cpu test, the numbers went up from 2200 wibblies to a much shinier 7000 wibblies. The new machine has 6 cores up from 4 and can handle 12 threads, up from 4. it’s also a little quicker in the GHz.

So – happy with the upgrade, although the heat and the dodgy cooler mean that I haven’t gone into heavier gaming yet. I’ll definitely replace the cooler and I’ll think about replacing the box. The diminutive size of the box means I’m limited on those cooling options and I’m unconvinced that it will get sufficient airflow.

The name ?

If the old one was called Pumpkin after being built at Halloween, this one had to be Meltdown :-D.

Addendum time …. I’ve figured out the heat issue … Check out this updated pic from this morning :

That’s much more steady, including a steady idle where I turned the Milkyway At Home calcs off to see how quickly the temperature changes would happen. This is much better.

Fix – in the picture in the middle of the post, the Clock is 4199MHz where the mainboard had auto overclocking enabled and turned the wick up on the processor. When the overclocking is disabled and the processor is back to stock 3600MHz performance, the temperatures are just fine. The idle went up to a little bit high 45 degrees C but I’m ok with that considering ambient temperatures.

This is a bit silly and a black mark against Asrock … The auto overclocking shouldn’t be enabled by default, it makes things hot and shortens the life of the machine.

Hello everyone.

Week off for me this week. I’ll go on so long and then need to get away from Stuff for a little while. That’ll be people, work, having to get up in the morning, various stuff like that.

Oh and it’s also a chance to listen to a lot of music, get stuff in that I wanted to have delivered, lots of general chill out. Maybe a few trips out and about, may that be in the virtual world or in the real world.

I haven’t actually listened to all of the music on the laptop yet and that’s approaching a year. I haven’t bought much music over the last year, only about 500 tracks. There are 1850 tracks to go to listen to everything and I’m at tracks in the S albums. After listening to tracks individually, I’ll queue up the albums and I’m in the O albums there. It’s a reasonably systematic way of jumbling up what gets listened to. The next album up in the queue is Once I Was An Eagle by Laura Marling.

One reason for these occasional weeks off is to rest, recover and let some of the painful bits fix themselves up a bit. I’m having to be careful with certain games at the moment, because my wrist is threatening to go very painful … First person games where you have to do fine aiming with the mouse seem to be the worst and I haven’t played many of those for quite some time. WoW was bad for it too because that fine aiming would see me looking to press certain buttons on screen.

Oh – tracks from one album have been coming through at the moment, that’s Scarlet and Other Stories by All About Eve and there are some great tracks in it, like Only One Reason.

Internet Spaceships may dominate, if that’s Elite, Stellaris or something different when the PC upgrade arrives …..

That’s the latest from EDSM star map and I’m now through the centre of the galaxy and heading way off to the left towards the farthest points you can navigate to from Earth. That got named as Beagle Point in game and is the next destination. I can now plot a route to it as well, with the route plotter being limited to just 20,000 light years. That was a great upgrade from the somewhat unreliable 1,000 light year limit it had when I first started playing.

I got me a new paint job … A few Dragon Green stripes in there.

And that’s Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy from at least a light minute out. (Earth is just over 8 light minutes away from our Sun and Mercury is 3.5 light minutes out). The ring inside the black hole is actually light deflected from the Milky Way ribbon to the top right.

Astronomy is fascinating. And scary when it comes to super massive black holes that just happen to be the engine that makes our galaxy happen.

I’ll hopefully get back to collecting some great screenshots soon (although there are more that haven’t been posted yet). But I would like to go back to some of the games that I set on one side for a bit. Like Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Prey which were going beyond the capabilities of my computer as it was at the time.

New bits are on their way … What’ll be in the box ?
AMD Ryzen 5 3600. Latest modest processor from these guys and it’s apparently better than Intel if you feed it with good memory.
X570 motherboard. Gotta have something to link it all together.
500GB M2 drive from Crucial. This’ll be my 4th SSD from Crucial and they’ve done well so far. This upgrade was a bit too tempting.
32GB of DDR4-3200. This will be another 4x upgrade from the 8GB I have here. More memory always helps because the unused memory gets used to help the disc caching out.
New box … and power supply. Because it’s awkward to take a motherboard out when it’s in.

I’ll be transferring over a 1060 graphics card and my various hard discs. Oh and a bluray drive that may need to be replaced because I think it finally failed. I had to abandon watching Rogue One tonight because it was breaking up too much and I think it’s actually been failing for a long time now because it was corrupting the imports of audio cds.

Oh and I’m happy with monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers so those will transfer over too.

One thing that’s annoyed me though is the attitude of my credit card company … I ended up using my debit card to buy the bits too because they (Barclaycard – beware of them) flagged the transaction as potential fraud despite the order being placed at the same IP address as I use to do all the paying off of that card.

They did the same thing last year with the laptop.

Highly annoying. Oh and they did an automatic phone call thing at 10.00 this morning to clear the issue. 10.00 on a Sunday ? WHAT IS THIS HERESY.

Back to reality and better things.

I don’t think the bits will arrive tomorrow because I ordered after they all went home on Saturday. May well find myself over in Cardiff again for munchies. And a wander. A wander that may well take me past :

Lego Shop
Music Shop
Sweet Shop
Market Book Stall
Cardiff Castle
(And I need to do a general shopping too)

Hopefully my back feels better this morning to allow me to do that. It was very stiff this morning. Perhaps because I left the window open last night on a cooler night than it has been. Oh and that 10.00am crawl and flop down the stairs for that call from the credit card people.

We shall see !

I feel like I might have a bit of catching up to do !

There’s been lots of internet spaceships over the last week … Also work stuff going on and the build up to the cricket World Cup final. You can probably guess that I’ve watched as many of the world cup games as I could. At some point, there might well be a team of the tournament post coming out …

May also have rewatched a very old film again last night. The models still look great even after all these years.

That was the starting point for a shorter expedition to see some of the prettier sights in the local neighbourhood. There’s my ship there in the foreground, with an asteroid space station behind which is located in the rings of a local gas giant. Looks spectacular with the Witch Head Nebula around too.

There we go. A little planetary expedition. Looks like they had the water all steamed up. Any use for tea ?

One stop along the way. The Dumbbell Nebula, with a tourist station (that doesn’t allow Commanders on board to sample the tea) orbiting a water planet.

That was one of the favourite shots of that expedition. I’m calling it “Adrift on a Nebula Sea”. (Except I was fully fuelled up and not really adrift).

There’s another shot from inside a nebula, with a Wolf Rayet star in the background. They’re very hot stars which have consumed almost all of their hydrogen and are fusing the heavier elements instead. In Elite, they’re big white stars that you can’t scoop for fuel.

If I remember right, that will be me basking and refuelling at a F or G type star with what looks like an older, smaller M type star in the background.

Before finding another of the Wolf Rayet stars.

It was getting near time to call a halt on that expedition though. Time to head home. (Another 2001 shot, showing the quality of the effects in that movie).

I’ve been out considerably further over the last few days, including experimenting with neutron star boosting. You start in ships that can do hops of up to 7 to 10 light years and better engines can make them reach around 20 light years. Choosing a lightweight exploration load out gets that to around 35. Engineering that to the nth degree means my current ship can do hops of 61.5 light years at a time with a little cargo. Neutron star boosting is a highly dangerous technique where you fly through the cones of a neutron star (here’s one) ….

… and that supercharges your hyperdrive. I’ve been testing jumps of just over 240 light years today. But you don’t get to see what was at the stars on the way with that, so I won’t be doing it too much.

How far have I got ?

There we go. The green lines show my course plot since restarting the character. I’m currently heading for a black hole system called the Great Annihilator before turning in for the galactic core. From there, it’ll be towards the opposite side of the galaxy and a loop around the East side.

Soon. I felt a little burnt out on the game perhaps today though, so while yesterday’s trip was the northerly leg of the trip to the left of that picture, today’s activity was the much shorter line heading out.

I found a good place to stop though. Back on it soon. Have a good next week everyone.

Oh – also took advantage of the heat to defrost the freezer as much as it could defrost yesterday which gave me a good excuse to visit the pizza shop after restocking again. Good times.

I’m seriously considering doing a PC upgrade again …

Trying to remember the last time I was seriously checking out doing an upgrade. Probably when AMD brought out their Ryzen 2 processor and then the time before would have been the Ryzen 1. It’s a good chip and is apparently a lot better than the competition from Intel, depending on who you talk to.

(Obligatory disclosure note – I don’t get any sponsorship of any kind. Also, if anyone recognises a picture, all but 1 of these are all from the Google and I would be overjoyed to add a credit if you ask).

Oh ! Anyone recognise the picture from the thumbnail ? We actually had one of those. Ended up having to hack a lot of the games too so that they’d work with the disc interface. Memory limits meant that programs would cheat …. and overwrite memory vital to the Operating System, ok if you didn’t need the floppy discs any more. Oh yes. This was a machine from the days of 5.25 inch actual floppy discs …

But I digress again. As per usual :-D. No internet spaceships again. Maybe.

Couldn’t resist. That’s part of the thing about upgrading actually. For Elite, I don’t actually have to upgrade at the moment. There is the very occasional judder but the machine I have at the moment (i5-2500k and nVidia 1060 graphics) is just fine with Elite at maximum graphics and 1440p. So no upgrade needed for that one. Maybe later when they bring in more features to the game. There will be more Elite screenshots in a later post, I caught a few shiny examples over the weekend in another expedition.

Games like Battletech and quite likely Prey and Deus Ex Mankind Divided (still need to play both of those) are a different story though. Battletech definitely munches through the 8GB in this machine and the Roguetech expansion was unplayable. Prey and DXMD will put greater pressure on the processor. So I’m much more open to an upgrade now.

The usual thing applies though … only spend what you want to spend. There is literally no upper limit to the daft money you can spend on a computer … but there’s usually no reason to go above a certain point. My machines are powerful but on the modest side. A graphics card that costs £800 will not give you 4x the fun of a £200 graphics card. I’m not convinced that a processor costing £800 is 4 times as good as one costing £200. There’s a certain pragmatism that has to come in to choosing the bits.

Saving money that can go to other better places means you can buy more toys than you could before. That £1173 between the £1476 nVidia 2080Ti card (yes you could buy a graphics card for more than what my first 2 cars cost) and a £303 RTX2060 card could go on a Lego UCS Millennium Falcon, a Lego Death Star with a significant amount of change.

Priorities.

Quite.

Ok, so what’s this modesty PC ? First up, it’s not going to be a whole PC.

It was a lovely relief when changing over laptops last time that my cookies and other internet stuff was just There. I didn’t have to set up all the passwords again. Maybe a bit scary that though when you think about it.

What I’ll be doing this time is keeping certain parts out of the old machine, like the screen, keyboard, mouse …

… hard discs and bluray drive and the rest will be upgraded. New box, motherboard, memory, power supply and processor. Oh and actually maybe definitely a new SSD because …

Quicker, much quicker. Oh and bigger too, so I could put the games that want the performance on the bigger disc. Last year, the 256GB M2 SSD that went in my laptop cost me a discounted £55 if I remember right. This year, you can have a 500GB SSD for £67 or a 1TB for £100. Neat. Pumpkin (current desktop) has a 256GB SSD, an ancient 256GB conventional drive but all the games (except Battletech which was more demanding) go on a 1.5TB conventional drive.

SSD – Solid State Device drive that’s essentially memory like you card in your camera. Ultra fast to find your stuff but not as high capacity.
Conventional drive – uses spinning platters with chemicals that store data magnetically. Takes much more time to get the platter to the bit of the disc that has your data. Takes ages if your data is all over the disc.

I better get to the details before I run out of pictures !

Processor – 3rd gen Ryzen 5 3600 costing £190. This goes at 3.6GHz and I don’t think the 3.8GHz of the 3600X is worth the extra £50. This comes in a Socket AM4 which needs a suitable motherboard.
Motherboard – there’s either the newest shiny of the X570 chipset and MSI offer one that has my eye for £180. Or an older one with by MSI with the less capable B450 chipset for £89. I think the better one is probably worth it here because the advantage is in the bandwidth in the PCI bus.

(Translation – the bits can talk to each other faster and it’d mean shinier graphics that go more smoothly)

Either way, both of them demand DDR4 memory. Don’t worry about what DDR4 means (Double Data Rate mk4 = faster than DDR, DDR2, DDR3, SDR and the other types that went before that I can’t remember). Things to look for are “System Memory Specification” and the Ryzen 5 3600 is looking for 3.2GHz. It would work with slower memory but it’s better to match the speeds. Options ?
DDR4-19200/2400MHz – slower, would work, 2 sticks making up 32GB from Kingston would be £145.
DDR4-25600/3200MHz – synchronised, 2 sticks for 32GB from Kingston again would be £188.

I think it’ll be the faster memory because apparently (Rockpapershotgun article) the Ryzens might like the faster memory.

I’d usually go for a cooler as well. I’m only likely to ever go air cooling, as having water around PCs when you don’t need to do that is a recipe for disaster. The Sandy Bridge machine I have now has been very stable on air cooling that probably has the Dust Bunny population of Bristol in it by now.

Wasn’t taken from inside my PC … honest.

Power supply ! Last but one piece. Corsair supplies have done me well over the years, so it’s over to them again for a 750W. A 650W would be more than enough for what I’ll put inside it but I’m looking to do a little future proofing. It’s well worth spending extra on a named brand like Corsair because power supplies do blow … and they can take out the other components with them when they do pop. I’ve had this happen before. Anyway, 750W for £75.

Case is a curious one. I had the eyes opened to one requirement I would have forgotten about. I do occasionally like to watch a dvd or bluray on my desktop and I’d miss that if I couldn’t. My computer chair is sadly a little more comfortable than my sofa. So the requirement is to be able to fit a 5.25″ sized bluray drive. Drives seem to be missing those out now …

Anyway – case … the AVP X6 caught my eye (link to Novatech) because it has 5.25″ bays and a couple of internal fans. Something else to look out for is the graphics card depth … there are some chunky cards out there. I need to do research there. Price – £35.

I think that’s it … total cost is £668 but bear in mind that’s missing the price of :
Graphics – budget for me is c.£200.
Windows – £100 for Windows 10 64bit Home.
Keyboard – £30 will be fine. Unless you find a £150 keyboard for £30 :-D.
Mouse – £30, this is very your own preference again.
(I go for wired for both keyboard and mouse, wireless has drawbacks that I don’t think balance the benefit)
Screen – mine is from AOC and I love it. 24″ 1080p screen from them would be £140.
Storage – I’ll probably acquire a 500GB SSD for £67. And there are 2TB conventional drives for £54.

I think that’s it.

If anyone local wants a PC built by the way, supply the bits (I’d consult) and I’d …

Substitute battlestation for computer.

More internet spaceships again ….

I’m admitting straight up too that I’ve been reading guides here and not solving stuff on my own :-).

That’s the last ship by the way, the “Captain of Elysium” with a name that follows a trend I’ve been using for the Federation combat ships. This one was a Federation Assault Ship and a pretty satisfying ship to fly around too. I’ve been indulging in the engineering to customise and handily improve the components that go on the ship.

One of those Pews is not like the other two Pew Pews. Before then though, I did a bit more investigation of the crashed ship that I found* (looked up while researching to discover it was a good place to go).

A sighting of the Thargoid scout ship, this time in much better light. Oh and as always, click for bigger.

Cue obligatory declaration of “I did not crash that ship officer, honest guv.”

That’s the newest ship. She’s the “Chrissa’s New Potato”, after HeyChrissa who is one of my most preferred streamers to have on. The joke is in the name, she thinks she has potato looks (Nope) and in my last Elite save, I attached the name “Chrissa’s Potato” to the most potato like looking ship. It’s an Asp Explorer and in the very original Elite with its wire frame graphics, it had the profile of a flattened off pentagon. It’s a good name.

Seen above there getting some quite hefty engineering work done to prepare her for going to Infinity …. and beyond ! (Or to the opposite side of the galaxy and back). There was a mission to perform before heading off though …

I’ve found a night vision system …. I like.

Doesn’t work for the remote camera shots though. What could be in these mysterious ruins ?

A curious obelisk, what could the markings mean ?

Shooting these pillars makes light come out of the top.

The defenders were spirited …. but their missiles were no match for the point defences on my conveniently close by ship.

The puzzle is solved but what will the reward be ? The defenders are attempting to make the reward one of dust …. (Yes, being shot at while taking the screenie !)

A lovely light show heralds the appearance of an orb … with data.

The objective is achieved, so it’s time to head off back to the base ship.

And a last pit stop before heading off to finish off the fit.

In Elite speak, it’s an Asp Explorer capable of jumping 61.47ly when fully fueled (that’s a lot) and I’ll be able to jump up to maybe 640ly before needing to refuel. Handy.

The objective will be to head off on an exploration binge that’ll probably be what I’m doing in the game for a good few months. There should be some awesome looking screenshots coming :-D.

What’s been happening since last time ?

Can’t believe I didn’t say anything about the Le Mans weekend the other week. It was a decent race again this time, although the overall winner hasn’t been in doubt much for a few years now. The Toyota’s pretty much walked away with it although they did have their scares throughout the race. It was a shame that the Aston Martins got hit with a Balance of Performance nerfbat (slight reduction in horsepower and fuel capacity) but their latest car hasn’t been particularly good lately anyway.

Oh … if I’m never seen from again :

I for one welcome our new green glowy overlords.

Elite has been a little grindy at the moment …. but that’s partly intentional and there’s an objective to it (getting stuff to modify the ships). Another phase in the game and actual progress in getting stuff for a rather long shopping list and seeing curious places.

That’s Site 426, happily pictured with the sun up this time. The Elite universe can be really harsh. In this case, the workers at this manufacturing site had a rebellion, took charge and … in something between normal and verging more on Warhammer 40k Dark, were brutally put down. (Link for more). What this means for the player is an abandoned settlement with plenty of goodies around the place for looting.

And back to the mothership sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD afterwards for tea as well. This one may have been named in an unfortunate caps lock incident. Oops …

Another site is the crashed ship, Bug Killer. This isn’t my ship … honest. I did manage to crash the buggy though but forgot to take a screenshot of the upside down buggy.

I have regrets.

Perhaps not as much as this fella though … I have his escape pod and may well be selling him to the highest bidder turning it in to the search and rescue people.

I watched a fair bit of the Nurburgring 24 hour race as well last weekend. This one is run over the Nordschliffe course, which is much longer distance than the Le Mans track, taking about 8 and a half minutes for the fastest cars to do a lap. A curious race. It’s a bit more chaotic than most other races, with course vehicles going around the track as they recover stricken vehicles. It was actually getting quite dangerous towards the fall of darkness and I actually stopped watching for a while.

And then tuned in again later to see how the Lexus cars were doing. Looks like they had problems. The 19 and 20 cars, both RCFs, tripped up over each other during the early stages of the race which took them out of contention. There was also a Lexus LC race car there which I was urging on as it too was recovering from earlier issues.

(The RC F is a race car variant of my IS. Same basic chassis, a coupe body shell and the hybrid bits are replaced with a chunky 5 litre V8).

It’s nice to have an underdog team to cheer on and the RCs have been doing well in the American IMSA series too. Hopefully the next Aston Martin car becomes quick enough to win races too.

Outside of that, loads of work stuff has been happening which I can’t talk about here. But it does mean I get out of the office, see interesting things, figure out what they do and what they’re capable of and carry the lessons back to feed into the next steps of what we’re doing.

It’s fascinating to see the differences coming in between theoretical performance of equipment and what happens when that kit is put into the real world. Is there a suitable analogy ? Maybe 2 laptops ago, where I had one that couldn’t keep its cool. It was advertised as a 2GHz laptop but when you asked it to do work, it would overheat and downgrade itself to 800MHz. So it could run itself at the top speed but when you needed performance (even just telly programme streaming), you’d actually own a much worse laptop.

I may also have had a day trip up to Gloucester last week (got caught in nasty traffic on the way back – oops). I saw boats ….

Oh and big long poles by boats. But also boats.

Quite lovely boats actually but this one was the most gorgeous of them all :

That’s the Isabella and she was looking amazing last week. A really pretty Dutch Barge.

Want one :-).

Tonight’s album coming through on the iTunes has been the Let It Roll collection by George Harrison and … I’ve been singing along to some of the tracks again.

Can’t remember when I did that last ! Which means it’s been too long.

(Picture credit – Theresa Snyder on Pinterest)

About those songs though !

The first one up for this list is that George Harrison opener to his Let It Roll collection, Got My Mind Set On You. A great post Beatles song, not sure about those lyrics now though …

A lot of Cardigans tracks get me like this too, countless of them indeed. But the track I seem to keep coming back to is Algebra, from the first of the two A Camp albums and it was borrowed at one point for the tv series Haven. Oh … here’s another one ! I started this post with the intention of just one song per group but … Communication is an awesome song that speaks to people like me on many levels. And the animated video is excellent.

A quick aside into instrumental music. This’ll get you humming along too and the last track up was from the 90s game, Master of Magic. This was a game heavily inspired by Civilisation but was transplanted to a fantasy and magic world with great variation in the races and the addition of a tactical battle layer. It also had a fantastic set of music in there, albeit usually transmitted over crude FM synthesisers in the sound cards. (not finding a worthwhile link to the music though)

Another instrumental that’s guaranteed to get me doing the chair bopping is Candyland by Tobu. One from the Non Copyrighted Sounds collection which are handy for streaming people, which is how I first heard it.

Going back a bit to the yoof days, we have the singers of groups like All About Eve and I’ll always join in with Martha’s Harbour. I grew up with the Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern books and Julianne Regan of AAE has always had the voice of one of the best characters of those books, Menolly. (The link is to the bonus version that has Apple Tree Man on it as well, another wonderful song from their first album)

I also grew up with Kate Bush, who can be tough to sing along to because of her incredible vocal range. But you gotta have a go anyway. I think the song for this collection is going to be Oh England, My Lionheart. A haunting song.

Talking of having a go, Alison Goldfrapp has as remarkable a voice as Kate Bush and uses it to devastating effect for Utopia. I think that’s inspired by the Fritz Lang Metropolis movie.

After those years, I dived into an Alisha’s Attic addiction and perhaps because the two sisters had diverse voices, it made it easier to sing along ? Maybe. The Incidentals is a really happy song to sing along to.

The Only Exception is a great one too, on a similar theme by Paramore.

One of the random tracks that popped up in the car on one of the trips lately was Fernando by Abba. Can you hear the drums ?

Hopefully we’ll never get Stuck on one of those trips (Caro Emerald at her best).

I did catch the boss man quietly murmuring away to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd on our last trip … I especially like how on the album, the transition from the previous track is a listener changing the stations on the radio, finding a thread of music and then joining in.

And then there are the powerful songs like Laura by Bat For Lashes. I’ve known a few people called Laura and they’ve been wonderful people. I wonder who Natasha Khan’s Laura was ?

Edie Brickell was another one I grew up with and Ghost Of A Dog was an especially poignant song. (No video because I’m not going to link to a rampant copyright thief !)

Something from way long ago which we’ve pretty much just rediscovered is the Jesus Christ Superstar album penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s an excellent album, the bible story set to 80s rock music. Hosanna tempts you in ….

The weather here at the moment is pretty shocking but you shouldn’t Blame It On The Weatherman. (B*witched)

What’s next ? Garbage are still going strong, making mayhem and taking names. One of my favourites of their songs is Cherry Lips from the Beautiful album.

You shouldn’t be Super Critical though, which is a great album from the Ting Tings. Best track and a definite one to join in on is Wrong Club.

I bet that club never plays Moves Like Jagger (Maroon 5)

This collection wouldn’t be complete without something from the infectious, impish Little Boots and I’ll go to Remedy from her first album. (note – video needs a flashies warning)

Another impish songstress is Norah Jones, latest of the tracks to play on my iTunes … Let’s see … Oh yes. Man Of The Hour is a fun song.

Mindy Gledhill’s songs have a definite joy that lifts the heart and makes you grin as you listen, like I Do Adore.

Last one. Ours was another car where Queen Greatest Hits tended to rule the popularity and … Yep. You’re about to be singing along to Bohemian Rhapsody again.

Nope. I have better. Yes. Better ! Star Trekkin’ … Across The Universe … Best music video ever.

So I spotted another of those quiz things online and it caught my eye …

There are a couple of quizzes in this list actually. The first is a D&D stats quiz … Here’s the result :

Your stats are:
  STR:11
  INT:15
  WIS:17
  DEX:14
  CON:10
  CHR:15
The usual logic for D&D stats is that they go from 3 to 18, with 9 being the average. They’re usually rolled from 3x 6 sided dice, although there are rules like roll 4, pick the best 3. For the really special characters, the score can exceed 18.

Oh ! Here’s the link for the quiz.

I think on those stats, I’d be some kind of lightly armoured cleric. They do well from high wisdom, are helped by charisma, although the typical D&D cleric will be operating in heavy armour which favours the strength over dexterity.

How about Alignment though … there’s another quiz for that over at the Wizards of the Coast site (link). That one’s coming out as Neutral Good, which I’m comfortable with. The alignments in D&D work on a 9 box grid, with one side going Lawful to Neutral to Chaos and the other going Good to Neutral to Evil.

Neutral Good means that you’re basically a good person and like to help out but you’re flexible about authority. It’s the alignment I’m most comfortable with in games because it gives lots of choice over the actions you do.

I’ve been back in the Internet Spaceships over the last few days. There’s no alignment in that outside of whether you do piracy or do bounty hunting. That’s a curious one because you could be hunting down pirates so that they don’t hurt anyone innocent or you can be doing it for the money … My character’s doing it for the money. Gotta fund those bigger ships !

Talking of ships … I left the last Internet Spaceship post with the Tortoise Beats Hare on the pad of a planetary base. It had more of a run later.

The main job of this ship was to get me into the Sirius system so that I could unlock another engineer. (Oh and as per always, click for bigger in the pics). But along the way, a visit to somewhere familiar …

Mission was accomplished :

That’s after switching into an Asp Scout, which was called the Niki and Charlie. At this point, I’d been making a few tribute names, with this one joining the fleet not too long after the death of Formula 1 legend, Niki Lauda. Charlie was for Charlie Whiting, who was the technical director of the sport for a long time, essentially acting as referee between the teams to ensure they had as level a playing field as reasonably practicable without any really dangerous ideas being allowed.

I went to one of the other engineer planets with this ship too to improve the shield generator.

The next ship was a specialist medium fighter called the Rage of Kashyyyk for Peter Mayhew, better known as Chewbacca. I didn’t run this ship around too much (wasn’t feeling the joy of combat at the time) but this was definitely an effectively punchy ship.

But I wanted to get back to easier times and mission running, so I jumped into the Type 7 freighter called Kerr Avon Forever. Another tribute name, this time for Paul Darrow best known as Kerr Avon in the legendary series, Blakes 7. This one actually generated a nice bit of funding for the fleet, although it did spark off that post about Joy.

The freighters aren’t particularly nimble beasts, which is actually good for the game. There needs to be clear differences between the various ships available. Each ship needs strengths, weaknesses and character. The Type freighters have massive cargo capacity, the largest capacity of ships of comparable size. But they’re very weakly armed and manoeuvre like bricks, whereas the Vulture class Rage of Kashyyyk is overgunned massively for its size, has great shielding and can keep its guns on target.

No docking computer in the Vulture either.

The freighter gave more than enough float money to acquire the next ship, also a handy bit of Federation ranks. I’ll save the flight to Rear Admiral for the forthcoming Black Sheep ship, that might be a while. I have a plan …

From last post, that’s the current ship. She’s the Commander Fuzzy, a Federal Dropship named after one of the better streamer people. Very nicely armed with a good bit of staying power too. It’s very odd though when you whip the nose around to track the target and it takes a while for the engines to catch up and get you moving towards them. The game makes a bit of a nod to Newtonian physics.

This ship is doing pretty well actually. One of those differences is the sound design, which is excellent. It’s a little daft that you can hear the other spaceships whizzing by in the depths of airless space but that does add a little atmosphere so to speak. This ship moans and grrs through its motions in a way I haven’t heard from the other ships.

I like it. Looking forward to stepping on to the other Federation ships in time now. Next up is an Alliance ship. I don’t have a good name idea for that yet, although the best names seem to come without really thinking about it. In the meantime though …

The Fuzzy has terrorised the pirates of Lodemovoi and 7 Andromedae and fed upon the broken wrecks of their ships.

Good times.

Oh and … a potato shaped highly misshapen planet caught the eye.

That’s a weird title isn’t it …

Actually this post could go absolutely anywhere. It’s mostly inspired by the memes that have sprung up around Marie Kondo and her KonMari method. If something does not bring you joy, remove it from your life. Perhaps a bit extreme when taken to … extremes but I can see the logic in it. The method is mostly about how to declutter your space but I think it could be applied to other areas as well.

For me, I have a massive amount of clutter in my house. Most of it is Lego. A lot of it is books and cds. There are quite a few movies and magazines too.

I look over at the collection of Lego, dragons and other assorted cute objects in front of the telly and it brings me joy. I look at the set of game boxes to my right and remember the joy of playing (most of) those games in their day. Behind me are the books and the cds. Gotta admit, the cd collection is a bit redundant now and could be hidden away somewhere. The ones I want to keep listening to got copied over to the latest laptop and the albums I don’t listen to … didn’t.

So in a sense, I have eliminated those albums that no longer bring joy from the collection. There’s a good few games too which I stay away from temporarily or permanently because they do not bring joy, either in that instant or because it’s a more fundamental thing. I’m currently in a campaign of XCom and there is definitely more a sense of terror than joy from that at the moment. I’ve been sticking with it though for … just … one … more … mission.

Oh and Bradford got a bit old between the two games :

I’m still fully engaged in that XCom campaign but I think I could quickly drop it and go straight into the next one. There are some big flaws in the core of the strategic gameplay which make it unnecessarily harder than it should be. A lot of that is fixed in XCom 2 which is a much more satisfying game to play.

Sometimes we hang around in patterns or in books even or experiences that as the nice Japanese lady might say, do not bring joy.

So why do we do it ? Why do we slog through the book that we’re not enjoying, the course that we’re training on or the game that feels far more grind than fun ? A lot of it is that we’re looking for the payoff at the end. We want to know the end of the story, we want those new skills or we want to experience all that the game has to offer.

I had a similar question with the cricket all those years ago. I was still having fun running full pelt around the place like a madman and contributing with the batting too. But it hit home when I was having to leave the running around to the fielders further out because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do much with the ball if I did catch up with it. Plus I had the whole concussion thing that heavily damaged my reactions in that final year. The first two games of that season were played in poor conditions as well, which prompted “Why am I still playing this ?” that combined with the muscular pain lasting for about a week after games by that point.

It was a lovely game to finish on though. Plus the decision to quit was kinda forced by my legs becoming much worse soon after the game making it impossible to play.

However, even without that serious illness with my outsides, I think I’d have been calling time on the cricket. At the time, my confidence in my coordination had been shattered by the affects of the concussion suffered in the nets before the season started, although I did not connect that until much later.

I’m (half!) watching an episode of Stargate SG-1 at the moment and … this series still brings joy. This is the first episode of season 9, where they kinda reboot it after what feels now like a heavily rushed season 8 where a huge amount happens in that series. An influx of new characters led by Ben Browder and Claudia Black joining up again after Farscape leads to a much needed freshness to the season. (The less said about the enemy the better !)

I’m happy to watch that again, with the counterpoint being the various DC universe programmes which got deleted earlier in the year. They no longer brought joy. I was grinding through them out of a sense of getting to the end. I figured it wasn’t worth grinding through to the end of those stories any more. I’ve also just dropped NCIS but that’s for different reasons.

We have limited time. If you are not enjoying the activity you are involved in, ask why you are doing that. Is there a better use of your time ?

And I do enjoy a good bit of chilling out and just relaxing these days.

Chat with good people is good too, although I tend to drift away from groups and conversations that are not Joy. Some people give me joy to be around, some do not. I prefer to talk to the people that bring joy. I also like to do things for those people too, like sending fun pictures, sending daft comments, other stuff like that.

If the people who give joy get joy from what I do, that makes me happy too.

I’m not sure if the latest book I’m reading is giving joy (Kim Stanley Robinson 2312) but it is giving a promising, intriguing start so far. I’m not so sure about The Expanse books. They had a brilliant start but I’m not sure where they’re going. Book 7 definitely struggled to Bring Joy, as did Book 3. It was notable that Book 3 was savagely cut down for the tv series.

I’ll stick with The Expanse series but I don’t think I’ll be rereading them like I have done with books like The Martian several times. That book definitely does Bring Joy.

I hope this post and the others you’ve hopefully read from me bring you joy in their own way. I think I’ve taken up enough of your time for today though, go do something fun !

Oh and …. catalyst for post. The old ship, the Kerr Avon Forever, did not bring joy. Although it was very profitable. That ship is the Commander Fuzzy, the smallest of the Federation ships and it has already fed upon the broken wrecks of many (several) enemy starships. It has definitely brought joy.

Although not tonight, cos I went to the Mall, had joy from wandering around the newly reopened HMV, remembered the joy from watching Michael Palin’s series on seeing his book about a ship called the Erebus. Nearly bought that too.

Tired now, watching Stargates, about to dive into the music and then it’ll be chilling out to video watching :-D.

Have a great evening everyone.

Another meme spotted ! And I can usually not resist these. This is the internet though, so I can’t give exact answers for a few of them. Here goes !

* How old are you: Older than the stars, younger than their planets. Or is that the other way around. Either way, indeterminate age. People seem to think I’m younger than I am, which probably comes from me looking to go for the fun stuff instead of boring stuff.

* Surgeries: Just the one, the second nose job.

* Tattoos: None. I do get curious about the art that people cover themselves with but if they have the attitude of “You have no tattoos, you are weird.” then I’ll find other people to talk to. We shouldn’t be preaching to others how they should live their life. Have tattoos if you want them, make them awesome ones if you do. I’ve just never had that urge to get one.

* Broken a bone: Several, just a couple (wrist and nose) properly diagnosed but the cricket definitely took its toll in bones over the years.

* Ridden in an ambulance: Actually no …

* police car: Yep, I got invited to see how fast they recorded me going but they let me off with a “We can’t caution you this time”.

* Ice skated: Yes. Several times, didn’t get on with it and the ice wasn’t a fan of me either. Or maybe it was, judging on how it seemed to have an uncontrollable attraction for me.

* Ridden on a motorcycle: No. Curious about it but not enough to let the curiosity override the fear of loss of life or limb.

* Stayed in hospital: Yes, see Nose Job 2. It was just overnight though.

* Skipped School: Don’t think so. Can’t remember. Skipped various classes at uni though, to a cost.

* Watched someone die: Nope. Seen the lead up but never the actual end. What you see in the last days stays with you, although it’s better to remember the times when people are much more alive than to remember the end. Remember their best times.

* Pepsi or Coke: Depends really. I will have either and will aim for the variety Diet. However, can’t tell a difference between Fat Pepsi and Thin Pepsi but there’s definitely something I don’t like about Fat Coke. Whatever one I get will depend on a) whether it’s being sold and b) which is cheaper.

* Favorite season: Summer. As in cricket season. Bit hot though.

* Received a ticket? No. I was literally 0.04mph away from one. Although I did get the car towed away once to an impound because the people who the tow truck was really called for were taking up the parking spaces.

* Favorite Colour: It varies. Blue is good. I choose red as in the Blood Red Banner often for strategy games, which kinda reflects the way I intend to play the game. But I do like the green of the Pocket Dragons.

* Sunset or sunrise: Sunset is pretty. Although both are things to be watched instead of driving into them.

* Beach or mountains : Mountains I think, although I think I’d really prefer somewhere quiet, chill, flat with lots of fresh air and peace …

* Who will play this with you: The person I nicked this from put “Who cares?” and …. same !

* Cat or dog: Dog. WOOF.

* Watch someone give birth? No

* kids: None.

* Samsung or iPhone: Samsung for phone … but it’s crap as a phone and the Android software is just not dialled in perfectly as it should be. There are lots of silly daft things that are off, or interactions in the phone like Bluetooth vs Power Management or the bloatware that just spoil it. I still use an iPhone 5 for the car music, it still works so I’ve never seen a reason to pay money to move the music to the Android phone.

* Favourite alcohol: I rarely have alcohol but when I do, I do like white wine.