Author: Sleepypete

I gotta find more things to write about !

Feels a bit like things are going whoosh by at the moment, although I am looking forward to another MCM Comic Con in London and the Lords T20 day at the end of the month. Oh and the annual Le Mans 24 hours watching.

Actually, I’m not that sure about Le Mans these days. It’s great to cheer on the Aston Martins but they are really boring races in the prototype classes. The Toyotas have so much more performance than the other prototypes and they are so reliable that they don’t make the mistakes or have the breakdowns that would let the competitors in. It is good to cheer on the Aston Martins though. I’ve actually been preferring to watch the Imsa series where there is much better competition in the prototype bracket and there are also a couple of Lexus cars to watch in the GT class.

Fun stuff. Oh and there’s Formula 1 as well, although that has its own frustrations due to races being affected by the very poor quality of some of the cars and about half of the drivers.

Bugs ? Yep. Bugs erupted on Sunday, I probably should have dipped out of doing a business road trip on Monday and have been keeping the bugs at home today and yesterday. It’s only light manflu. Notdedyet.

Still bugs though. I’ve been putting a dent in the coffee supply …

Internet spaceships ! I had a session on Sunday (and very nearly put big dents in the ship with a rather too rapid landing at the end …) but stayed out cos of those bugs yesterday and Monday. That’s after pretty much being in there for sessions all last week. What’s the pilot been up to ?

I’ll come back to this one. (Wanted a good thumbnail pic !)

Let’s see. I left the last post with pictures of the Needs More PewPew. It was unarmed, like all of my trading ships up to now. It’s not really worth arming them because it puts too much of a dent in the jump range and cargo capacity. With the class of ship I’ve gotten up to so far it’s better to run than fight. But I’ll be showing those random pirates what for soon.

The Empire’s Bounty followed the Needs More PewPew. This is a Type 6 freighter and it allowed a little more cargo room enabling faster progress through the missions. My character is now Baron iceangel of the Empire, which lets me own the Imperial Clipper. Here’s the last one I had :

A little photoshopped in that pic. The next one will be in a black paint job, be called Black Sheep and do missions for the Federation, enemy of the Empire. That’s in a little while though.

Next up after the freighter was the Dolphin class Porpoise Prospector, seen there looking at the abandoned Dav’s Hope settlement. The lore says that it was a mining settlement abandoned after the tunnels collapsed in on themselves, the settlement was then evacuated in a hurry with the inhabitants leaving all sorts of goodies behind. Stuff that’s good for modifying your ship for things like extended jump range.

That let me pick up this one, the Searching For Tea :

I’m off on a little jaunt with that one at the moment. I’ll update the link on the right with this EDSM link to my commander, which has a track of where I’m at currently in the game. The plan is to follow the route given by the Norma Arm Expedition, which will see me get most of the way to the galactic core. I’ll then head East for a while and then return in a generally triangular pattern. I’ll do the Galactic Core later in a different ship. Oh and Beagle Point too, which is the given name for the furthest point from Earth you can get to.

It’s good to have plans for the various ships. Like I intend to never to passenger carrying in the specialist passenger ships. They complain too much :-D. Exploring is good though and they’ve massively improved the exploration tool. Previously, you had to fly to each planetoid individually to scan them. Now, you can fire up the discovery tool and instantly see if there’s anything worth hanging around for. Like metal rich planets, earthlike planets, water worlds, ammonia worlds. Stuff that we’d be interested in knowing about as a culture looking to expand throughout the galaxy. Places with materials, places with life.

Places with an amazing view. They call that place “The View” in game and it’s an incredible sight with those rings illuminated purple by a dwarf star combined with the funnels of the neutron star in the distance. This is the place from the first picture from a little further away. I didn’t land at this one because even in low orbit, the gravity was cranking up to 3g+ and …. that old saying of “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one” doesn’t really apply in 3g when you’d be having issues breathing let alone walking !

The commander is currently sampling the tea at Eagle’s Landing :

A place with another pretty nebula view.

I’ve definitely been enjoying being back in the game since restarting. Going up the ships without cheating by skipping ahead with a few of them has been really good. In games like this that can get really grindy, it’s good to have goals along the way that break up that grind. Next ship will be a little combat racing ship, after that it’ll be a Keelback armed freighter that I’ll use for a spell of mining.

And there will be a few ships after that which my pilot should already have the credits for. Good times. That’s after I get back from the jaunt in Searching For Tea.

Maybe another explorer ship will be called Searching for Coffee. Or … I got one ! Searching For Mini Eggs.

Searching For Lego ?

11 days since last post …. oops. What have I been up to ? Let’s allow the non game stuff to be first up :

Mum trip ! Good trip. Nicely chilled out and good to see the mum and sister again. (There may also have been bonbons, sherbets and marshmallows raided too). Those away trips always wipe me out though and I’ve enjoyed chilling out this long weekend.

Which included books …. the Book Barn have been running a sale this weekend and I may have paid a visit. Almost didn’t because I woke up yesterday with a huge headache. Like one of those headaches that’s definitely interfering with rational thought. I’ll blame that for these being liberated :

Robert Heinlein – Podkayne of Mars and I Shall Fear No Evil
Kim Stanley Robinson – 2312
Greg Bear – Hull Zero Two
Larry Niven and Steve Barnes – The Descent of Anansi

The two Heinlein books are a couple of rare ones I don’t own yet, KSR wrote the excellent Mars series, always been curious about Greg Bear and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read from Larry Niven. I’ve finished off Embers Of War, more coming about that at some point.

It was also great having a lunchtime catch up with someone who’s been an amazing friend over the last few years too. I hope that the headache wasn’t making me too dour company :-).

I’ve definitely been enjoying being back in Elite though. Yesterday’s session was pretty awful for making progress (my combat ships were outclassed in the fights I was putting them in) but it did melt away that headache. I have more ships now. Many more ships …

Warning – picture spam incoming.

That’s the most spectacular though. This is a gorgeous game when the planets literally align. Here we have the Greater Dragonbug emerging from the space station when the orbiting planet was in total eclipse. Oh and look at that ring eclipse too.

That’s Greater Dragonbug, the Adder class sister ship to the Hauler.

That’s a smaller Viper 3 class ship, called Mini MagPew. There will be a lot of references appearing in these names. My last character had a Viper called Space Viking …. and the obscure reference follows from there.

Before finally escaping the new starter zone in the Cobra Mk3, Keelas Wings. A handy ship which got upgraded for early mission running, raising the cash for the next two. Trading and courier missions got very lucrative, especially for the smaller ships. However, it does help to know where the best systems for it are. Usually, the missions from one station will have their destinations distributed across the local area. Unless …. the local area only has a couple of stations in it. For those, all of the missions go to a couple of stations so you can do loads of courier jobs at the same time for more profit.

Oh and click for bigger in the screenshots !

Not completely aimless now. There is a plan ….

The plan may involve coffee.

It didn’t involve a new paintjob for this one after scraping across the landing pad down there. That’s Long Sight Base, which is on a higher gravity world (1.3g) which puts much more strain on the thrusters.

More ships ! That one’s the Dauntless, an Imperial Eagle named for the other Eagle I had (Undaunted). A nice little ship, nippy and packing a punch from the railgun I had in there. But outclassed by pretty much anything else out there. It did better than the replacement :

That’s the Mighty Magpew, which was …. anything but. Odd, because I seem to remember this ship being better for my last character. Could be those headache issues. This one nearly got blown up a couple of times as I ran away very quickly from bigger ships that totally outclassed it.

This one got me back on the right track though. That’s a Diamondback Scout called Day Tripper, which let me learn the new exploration system. Previously, you’d ping the system to find out roughly what was in it and then would have to fly to everything to scan it. Now, you still ping the system but have an analysis system that’s like having a telescope and spectroscope. So instead of guessing whether a planetoid is worth scanning, you get that from the spectroscope now and then check them out further via the telescopes.

It’s so much better. Anyway, that ship earned me almost 19m credits which was a great return on its 3m investment. But I’m on to the next one already :

That’s the … have a look at the next pic. 😀 It’s a Cobra Mk4 that I’m going to use for some more intensive mission running to unlock the Imperial ships. Oh and for fun and profit too.

One plan for this time around is to go up the list of ships available, from cheapest to most expensive, finding a useful purpose for each one. The Cobra 4 is for mission running, I’ll run the first freighter until I go up another Trading level and then it’s a Dolphin totally misused to do planetary landings for prospecting.

I’ve definitely been enjoying back in Elite. It feels like my hands have been agreeing too. I haven’t had the physical issues erupt like they do with Skyrim or WoW.

Oh ! What’s the ship called …

There we go. Zoom in for name. One thing about this picture though, there’s some really daft design in the Elite world. That’s an Outpost, which has all of its landing pads on the outside. Some of them are in really odd positions, with obstructions on the landing pathway. So for this one, you have to come in curved (or from above). Whereas if the landing pad was reversed by 180 degrees, you’d be coming in from the space side instead of the station side.

A small criticism :-D.

I’ve gone back into the internet spaceships !

Also Lego happened. And Thorntons Easter eggs. (Other easter eggs are available too)

More on the Lego in a future post but I would happily recommend the 20th anniversary Pod Racer model. Nice build and a lovely model.

I’ve been thinking about going back into Elite for a while but one thing that has kept me away has been the various new changes that have been introduced since I last played almost a year ago. I’ve been enjoying coming back in, although I have retired a character again. Cmdr Keela Danne has retired to one of those Earth Like planets she found for some serious chilling out while the space ship empire gets handed over to new management.

Enter Cmdr Iceangel (again) as I go back to the name of my first character. The ship up above is the Money Spider, named for the smallest ship in the game, the Sidewinder. These ships are like paper … if a laser goes off in the next star system, this ship will probably explode.

But it’s a nice ship to start in, even if you take off the shields and weapons and pray no one has a go at you.

Oh ! Cmdr Keela retired with 348m credits in assets over 19 ships and …. zero insurance claims. As in, no deaths for that character. And I was occasionally poking things with the lasers, just running away quickly when the damage was getting too great.

Ship 2 is the Undaunted, an Eagle class light fighter ship. I’ve been playing the new new player experience thing that’s … new with the latest patch that arrived on Tuesday. That’s added a few systems that are permit controlled, so only the newest players can jump into them. The intention is that with those safe areas and a nicely beefed up set of help menus, new players can learn the game.

Definitely weird starting off with a ship that’s capable of autodocking and (another new thing) autolaunching. I’ve actually turned those off because I don’t trust them yet. I did a little docking and landing tutorial a while ago (video link). Gosh that’s quiet after watching someone else’s video. Maybe he’s loud. And I hate my voice still. Oh ! I think that may have been video 3 where I messed up by not realising that the nVidia Shadowplay was recording my voice as well as Audacity, hence the bad volume settings.

Anyway ! Eagle. Good ship for fighting and it’s one of 6 that’s available in that starting area. Oh and you’re limited on modules too, with only E and D modules available. Only lasers too. The 6 ships are the starting Sidewinder and then the Eagle, Hauler, Adder, Viper 3 and the ship I’ll leave the zone in, Cobra Mk3. It’s a good selection of ships. (Although the Hauler is still nasty !)

And then there’s the Dragonbug :

A little ship, built for being your starter hauler ship. But it’s slow and only has one laser hardpoint, so I’ll be in an Adder or Viper 3 next time I play.

Oh and the game is still rather pretty :

Criticisms :
The texture work of the asteroid interior is a bit dodgy.
Anti-aliasing has done a number on the yellow guard rails on the walkways.

But it’s a starbase dug into an asteroid. This is awesome ! Elite is definitely one of the prettier games out there and there are stellar sights which look so much better. I do like how the spot light is illuminating and scattering off the dust between it and the spaceship. Also nice reflection off the right hand side of the pad.

Other things from resetting :
Inara.cz has recovered from the save game reset, with a few niggles.
EDSM is very confused and wasn’t updating. Hopefully that fixes before I go out exploring again.
The trade system is so much better now, you can find the best trades from within the game now, instead of having to ask sites like EDDB. It’s still a good idea to ask EDDB for trade routes … but if you’re going from one station to the next running courier missions, this is so much better than it was before.

So yeah ! Back in the pilot seat, enjoying it too. Hopefully my hands hold up to it. My right hand is getting more prone to RSI issues now and didn’t like the Skyrim session that I had on Monday. And other bits of me don’t like the play until eyes close of a Stellaris session.

And it’s so pretty.

One more day and then back to work !

And hopefully back to the normal sleep pattern. Stellaris isn’t good for normal patterns.

What have I been up to …. I was feeling pretty burned out at the start of the break. The way my body works is that I’ll soak up pressure and tiredness up until a certain point … and then probably go beyond that point into areas that get a bit silly.

I’m not talking about opening Stellaris at noon and closing it again at 1 (am). No, this is more like not anticipating conditions (it’s suddenly gone into near summer weather here !), possibly nearing heatstroke and generally hitting the limits of what I think I can do at the moment … and then going beyond.

(The latest is Friday, which I promised someone I wouldn’t talk about too much !)

Friday was a good opportunity to grab the pizza though. Even if that ended up being a still eating at 11pm thing.

That’s another sign of my personal time clock shifting when I’m on leave, or playing Stellaris. I was munching dinner at 11pm again last night, that’s not good for all sorts of reasons. But that’s bad stuff, what about the fun ?

This week’s been about chilling out, to the games, to the music, to catching up on watching stuff. Stellaris has soaked up a lot of time again, with a fella called Quill18 (youtube guy who I watch a little of) going for the 200 years of peace achievement. So I thought I’d see about turning the gameplay back to something simpler and seeing about collecting the achievements. I’m up to 52 now out of 95, with 40 coming in the last couple of weeks. Including that 200 years of peace (it was actually 325).

Fun times, mixed in with a lot of terror when the crisis events happened. The trick to the peace as a pacifist race is being strong enough that no one wants to try and attack, which is harder than it sounds because the AIs in Stellaris can be quite aggressive … in the first attempt at the achievement, AIs were attempting to attack even when their cause was hopeless because they had nowhere else to go.

That’s how that game essentially ended, with my combined fleets taking on the AI Contingency which was attempting to sterilise the galaxy. Oh and it went a little further than that for one of the achievements :

I think that star was a little bit bigger than the Dyson Sphere my people had created to capture its output.
The latest game sees me playing the complete opposite, they’re a bunch of murderbots called the OTHAN Core (Over The Hill Artificial Nexus) with that name reflecting how I was feeling on Saturday after lots of walking on Friday !

We’re on the left there having worked our way through 3 competing races so far. The next war will be against the 4 neighbouring races who have joined up in a federation. The main disadvantage to playing as the Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm or in this case, Determined Exterminator, is that diplomacy is impossible and the other races will gang up in defence … because they’re scared.

Makes for challenging games.

I’ve also enjoyed finishing off the Battletech campaign. A curious game, they brought out the gameplay in the tabletop game but I wasn’t convinced about the scenarios they put it in. It’s like the difference between having a set of rules to play with and having a fun world to play in. I’m not sure that the Roguetech mod allows for that. It greatly expands the rules but doesn’t do much about the world. I may well give it another shot, especially as I’ve given Avast the boot after thinking that it was hurting performance too much.

Lots of music has been happening too as I steadily work my way through the library again. There are less than 4000 tracks to go now until I’ve listened to everything … and along the way more new music will appear. I have my eye on Jade Bird and Emiliana Torrini after hearing a couple of their tracks over the last few days.

I’m up to listening to the G albums now.

I have an episode of Titans on at the moment in another window. An interesting modern take on it, which I’ve been more intrigued about than enjoying perhaps. I’m wondering where it will be going.

I’m up to series 6 with Stargate SG-1, which I have more mixed feelings about. If you watch that after reading the British Stargate fanfic thing, the series is very much a dumpster fire in comparison. O’Neill is a decent character but …. he’s also very often written as a bit of a prat. Stealing technology, the Red Sky episode where he allows impetuousness to override how he deals with the locals. It’s a much loved series but I have reservations about it now.

I’ll keep watching though. It was one of the best series on when it came out but … is probably ageing a bit badly now.

Now though, I think it’s a little bit of Skyrim !

Another meme sighted ! This one is :

You have to pick 7 films for a marathon all-nighter, but the rules are: 1) the films must be franchise films & 2) all 7 films must be from different franchises.

Let’s see. What can we come up with from that one. Oh and you know already that a lot of these are going to be scifi don’t you ? I’m totally ignoring that must be franchise film rule by the way.

First up is the inevitable Star Wars film, it’s Rogue One.

This was an incredible film when it came out with a compelling storyline that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe. The characters really sprung to life and made you feel what they were going through. The visuals were incredible. The digitally resurrected Tarkin was utterly chilling.

Next up is Passengers, a love story set on a space ship in the reasonably distant future. A small cast … but there is great interplay between the two leads. There’s great drama and …. a tear or two were genuinely shed while watching this movie. Oh and you gotta watch the gag reel in the extras especially for Jennifer Lawrence’s incredibly filthy laugh. I suspect she had huge fun with this movie.

Time for a super hero movie and I’m picking Thor Ragnarok. This is one film that definitely didn’t take itself seriously at all. I was head bopping to Led Zep’s Immigrant Song right at the start and there was a bemused grin on my face all the way through watching it at the cinema. Twice.

A film I haven’t watched for ages is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Actually it’s a toss up here between this film and House of Flying Daggers. Crouching Tiger led the way here bringing this genre back to popularity and it was a stunningly beautiful story, cinematography and setting. And House of Flying Daggers continued and extended that.

Is that two picks or one ? I need to watch both again !

Number 5 is 2001 which was an incredible movie in its day. Bit boring perhaps but an absolute triumph for the visuals. The modelling work still looks great today.

Up at 6 is Pacific Rim. Another soft fluffy absolute FUN movie with big silly robots fighting sillier big monsters. This list had to have some daft fun in it and Pacific Rim definitely fits that for a movie I’d happily watch over and over again.

Last one will surprise many and I’d urge you to go see it if you haven’t. It’s the Handmaiden from 2016, a gorgeously shot and played film set in Japan. A nefarious scheme has been hatched to separate a young heiress from her money … But will it go as everyone plans ? This one kept me guessing all the way through and it was a delight to experience it. (Adult warning though – there’s some strong stuff in this one)

Honourable mentions go to the Matrix films. To Interstellar for a story that also got the tears at the end … but it suffered for the silliness that broke it’s scifi. I didn’t think I could add a Star Trek movie but Wrath of Khan, The Motion Picture and Insurrection are definite candidates. I thought Battle Angel Alita was a marvellous film this year, as was Spiderman into the Spiderverse.

I need to watch Studio Ghibli movies too. I loved Spirited Away when I watched it many years ago.

Hmm … any more ? I do have a sizeable dvd/bluray collection. The Riddick movies were excellent scifi.

And then there’s the Resident Evil movies, the Independence Day movies, Mad Max, Die Hards. Armageddon and Deep Impact (and Meteor). The Jurassic Park movies. Yes I’m trolling but you should definitely check out Troll Hunter as it’s a marvelous film too.

And I just looked over at the blurays and instantly spotted The Martian ! How could I leave that one out !

I’m pretty tired at the moment.

Soon. The run from Xmas to Easter always seems really long and that burns me out after a while. What I really should do is find a time around March time to take a week and rest up before More Things happen around Easter. This time around, work took me away on trips away for a day which were great (apart from the meeting day which was meh but had to be done) and I actually felt far more hyper after a couple of those than I have done all year. But that gets to the limit of my energy after a while.

That’s improving though, I think my general health is improving as my outsides improve. Probably due to being able to sleep a bit better recently.

What isn’t helping is multiple threats and worries, within and without. I won’t talk about those here. But they are weighing on my mind a lot.

While I haven’t been reading much lately, I was enjoying Embers of War and I really need to reopen that one. Similar with the drawing. I need to get the pad out again at some point and practice again. Because people seem to like the drawings.

Games have been dominating my downtime lately, both in watching videos of games and in the playing too. Oh and if you have Netflix, check out Love, Death and Robots. I enjoyed the first 6 of these. Well, maybe The Witness was a bit too weird but Three Robots was amazing as was “When The Yogurt Took Over” and Suits.

Let’s see … the Battletech campaign has been continuing with mechs stomping the opposition and the occasional tragedy on our side too.

Iceangel (yep, old name back) leads the company from her Highlander mech called Can Be Only One. Yep. I went there :-D. I have a melee specialist in the For Behemoth ready to get close, thump things and then barbecue what remains. That one was piloted by Quarterback, who was the latest casualty of optimistically trying to stay around when the best choice would be to eject and save the pilot.

You can take 4 mechs along, so the other two are the lighter (still heavy!) mechs of varying roles. Like the long range missile mechs of Storm Of Bees, Fuzzy’s Fireflies and Lurking Doom. There’s a couple of long range gun mechs in Elysian Fire and Rumbling Thunder. The idea is to engage at range while the heaviest mech runs in close to barbecue things. It seems to be working, although the AI doesn’t give you an easy ride and tends to pick on already wounded mechs. I do too, all’s fair in war and all that.

Here’s the fallen so far, including the daftest so far. Most of the pilots have been lost to shots to the head bit. Very lucky shots …

Poor Apex getting mugged on her first mission. I named a mech Apex Predator for that one but it was an ill fated mech too. There are also the Remember Behemoth, Rise Seneschal, I really need one for Medusa and the next big mech to be reclaimed will be something like Quarterback Sneak. The game does a decent job of having you keep an eye on your pilots. Glitch is great with random comments “Will there be bears?” and I actually feel bad about losing some. Medusa too, who returned from massive injuries, to get injured again in his next battle and then eating a head shot in the battle after that.

And then there’s mech names like Prickly Hedgehog and Bunnies. Sometimes the names come ! Sometimes the brain only has bunnies in it.

I also went back into Stellaris for the first time in a while. This was totally without mods to see about getting some achievements collected. The true target was 200 years of peace, which won’t come in this game. The two nearest neighbours keep declaring war, keep getting crushed and ….

My mob are in the south in the light green with a Heart symbol. They’re Fanatic Pacifists, the heart symbol seemed appropriate. The two belligerents are just to the North and North West but the big threat is the blue Swarm guys to the East. They’re a devouring swarm that is just as powerful as my race economically and …. they have an overwhelming fleet advantage. I suspect they will declare war while I’m fighting the two close AIs again and … the best course of action if they do will be to modify my species to make ourselves Delicious (yes, you can do that !) and throw ourselves on to the Swarm’s dinner table.

I have a Cunning Plan to get that 200 years of peace achievement. I’ll roll up a Devouring Swarm, eat everyone and put the game on fast forward for an hour or so.

Sorted.

Yep. Games have been fun again lately. Hopefully I can get my Skyrim game running again soon, as the latest patch did a massive number on all the mods I use. A stable game suddenly became very unstable and the mods wouldn’t link up between themselves. The Cunning Plan there is to delete everything and start again. The deletion happened at the weekend and I’ll put things back on at some point.

On leave next week though. I’m hoping to escape the house for at least a couple of days too ! Stow on the Wold is fairly close by and I remember it being a nice place to visit. It’ll be good to go back.

Be well everyone.

I’m pretty tired as I type this, so sadly no drawings to back it up but there does appear to be a few photographic bits of evidence that have been left in my wake after the latest rampage events.

I’ve had trouble with my insides for a good while. My insides make too much acid and that gets pretty uncomfortable. Especially when attempting to get to sleep.

(Last night was a doozy ! Both me and my mum had the fish at the pub and we were both affected by nasty cases of acid as we discovered this morning)

But. There is much to be said for taking a disadvantage and turning it around to your advantage.

In this case, I’ve been keeping it quiet but for the last few months I’ve been undergoing experimental gene therapy. I had a little foretaste of this after eating the garlic bread at Turtle Beach, burping and I’m sure a little bit of flame came out.

(credit – Ines-ka of Deviantart, see link)

Of my mouth ! Not the other end. That could have been bad.

But yeah ! It sounded like a great idea. Start with that excess hydrochloric acid that’s being made. Add something to liberate all that flammable hydrogen. It also helps if it makes something tasty. Salt is good and one half of that is Sodium. This video has a demonstration involving Aluminium. Sodium is really reactive though (think – explosive in water) so the gene docs had to make a few modifications so that I wouldn’t go the way of pigeons that have been fed baking soda laden bread. (Don’t do that folks)

We thought about Iron too and I do have a taste for Irn-Bru (made in Scotland from girders) but Iron isn’t quite reactive enough for what we wanted.

I’m getting sidetracked.

A few bits of gene modification later, a strengthening of the stomach lining, addition of a second stomach as a reaction chamber and some membranes behind my front teeth as igniters too and …

I breathe fire now. How cool is that !

Bit of a drawback when trying to put out the candles though. One of the Double D boys has a birthday today ! Happy birthday !

Picture credit – ZookieDragon of Deviantart again.

It’s great for the cooking too.

Maybe.

That totally wasn’t a horrible accident that happened during experimentation. Honest.

 I picked up more marshmallows too this weekend ! Totally looking forward to trying out the new abilities on those. It’s also a good way of disposing of the junkmail we all get too. Smoke alarm doesn’t like it but … smoke alarms are a bit rubbish anyway.

Totally.

One thing I’m not looking forward to are the cramps they warned me about. My metabolism was always a bit odd when it came to cramping and dehydration and salt balance. I’d like salt bomb myself into cramping by having too much salt on my dinner after running around. And that Sodium Chloride waste product from the hydrogen production could well lead to muscles that want to go bang.

I guess that just means lots of water or. Come to think of it …. Something more flammable to increase the flame effect !

YES. DEFINITELY.

I had nothing to do with that. Honest.

Another meme is doing the rounds ….

Top Ten Video Games of all time ! This one is supposed to be thought of really quickly, so I’m going to brain dump first and then you’ll see the filled in post eventually when I hit that publish button.

1. Elite
And its various incarnations over the years. I’ve played the original on the BBC B, Elite on the Atari ST, Frontier Elite 2 on the ST, attempted Frontier 2 on the PC (far too buggy) and enjoyed Elite Dangerous as well.

These games are an open ended dream, allowing you to set out on an alternate life as a space trucker, mercenary, bounty hunter or a mix of all that. And they all looked amazing in their day, with the latest game being perhaps the most beautiful game I’ve played.

2. Master of Orion 2
Ahhh, an oldie but a goodie. Think Civilisation mechanics translated into space, centred around stars with a planet to colonise and fleets of spaceships going all the way up to Death Stars to impose your will on the rest of the races of the galaxy. Perhaps a bit of a one trick pony with the races though, as it had a mechanic where you couldn’t have all of the technology unless you were Creative, so there were race picks that were massively overpowered. I hugely enjoyed losing days in this one until Stellaris came along.

3. Master of Magic
Another old classic. This one was again heavily inspired by Civilisation, however instead of human races with minor differences, this one had Humans, Orcs, Elves, Dragonpeople, Dark Elves, Trolls and more, each having far more major differences, advantages and disadvantages. This is a legendary game and I really must give Endless Legend another look as the most recent attempt at doing this type of game again.

Oh and one thing this had which was a major plus over Civilisation, there was a tactical battle layer in which to resolve the fights between your units and heroes. Civ never, ever had that. And your character could take an active role in your campaigns, with world altering spells on the strategic scale and the ability to unleash fireballs, lightning bolts and the apocalyptic flame strike in the tactical layer.

4. Revs

This was another game that really pushed the boundaries of what was possible on these first home computers. Revs was a game by Geoff Crammond for the BBC Micro back in the 80s which had you racing around old Silverstone in a Formula 3 car. It was amazing for its day and I loved playing it. There was later an expansion which brought more tracks and it was developed into the Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix series of games. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the original ideas were carried through to the F1 games of today.

5. Neverwinter Nights
This was a Dungeons and Dragons game from Bioware, which was their next game after the legendary Baldurs Gate 1 and 2. But whereas I bounced off the more acclaimed Baldur’s Gate games (and haven’t finished either), I was happily addicted to the less complicated but far easier to play Neverwinter Nights. The innovation here was to take the 2d isometric games into the 3d world, within the limits of what could be done at the time again. When I’d finished this game with one character, I was very happy to dive straight back into it with more characters to play through the game in vastly different ways. And then I did the same with the two expansions and the Player Race Consortium (or something other for PRC!) pack which added in all of the 3.5ed Prestige classes for even more variation.

6. Tie Fighter

Another Star Wars game from the mid 90s and another cracker. Whereas the original had you flying for the Resistance in an XWing, this one had you flying for the Empire in their mix of TIE fighters, bombers and interceptors. A fantastic game with a gameplay model which was immensely satisfying. It was superbly balanced between rewarding reflexes, introducing adrenaline and avoiding the frustration that games like this from that time could introduce.

The area where a lot of these games fell down on were missions which were just plain silly, which must have been designed as gateways to stop you completing the game too quickly. Missions with instant fail conditions or where the opposition was just plain daft. You’d play the mission perfectly but because some part of the AI did something silly, you’d fail and not be able to progress. This one was difficult … but still very possible.

7. Deus Ex Human Revolution
I was very happily addicted to this one when it came out. It didn’t do everything that games like even the older Deus Ex did but what it had, it did incredibly smoothly and accurately. The gameplay was tuned to perfection. And I enjoyed the storyline too, completing this game numerous times.

7.5 Mass Effect series
I nearly forgot this one ! How could I ! You play as Commander Shepard, an elite space marine who finds her(him)self on a crusade to save the galaxy from the implacable Reapers. Another classic from Bioware, although it’s a shame that ME3 and ME-A suffered from interference from the publisher and were rushed out before they were ready.

8. Motorsport Manager
I’d been after a good racing manager game for quite some time before this one appeared. It’s given me excellent chill out times while still being somewhat of a challenge to win. Your decisions have a genuine impact on how your people do in the race and it’s no cakewalk. However, the one criticism I’d have is that when you figure out the metagame of how to rapidly grow your team, your group will outstrip the competition in the space of a season or two and then the challenge starts to go.

9. UFO and XCom
These games have been going for years … decades ! The idea is that aliens have arrived to invade the Earth and your covert XCom organisation is the only thing standing in their way.

These games depend on a steady ramp up of difficulty where more advanced and deadlier enemies appear as your organisation researched the technology to match them and eventually figure out how to repel their invasion. Take too long though and the aliens will win and that’s curtains for humanity.

The original game had you starting with 10-14 soldiers, going up to 26 later. It had a sequel called Terror From the Deep and then XCom Apocalypse which added a real time mode. I hugely enjoyed Apocalypse but it did get grindy at the end. The less said about XCom Interceptor the better and then the series effectively died until the recent XCom reboot. The two newer games are excellent as well.

10. Starfleet Command
Lastly for this set is the Starfleet Command games. These were based on the tabletop Starfleet Battles game and is another set that I hugely enjoyed.

The first 2 games covered the Original Series Kirk era, with SFC3 moving to the TNG era. Whereas most of the real time strategy games of the time were based on basic hit points and other resources, this one was about single ships and put much more detail in there. Shields with recharge rates, power generation that had to be managed between systems and it was much slower and strategic.

The story based campaigns were excellent but it was a shame that the online Dynaverse system didn’t work too well.

Did I mention being able to customise your Star Trek ships too ? These were excellent games.

Honorable mentions go to :

Stellaris – took over from Moo2 as my space strategy game but the 2.2 patch has damaged it considerably.
Falcon 4.0 – I need to play more flight sims and greatly enjoyed this one. It had the combat elements, the flight elements and put them into a dynamic war campaign.
Star Wars Pod Racer – so close to being in the Top 10. Thrills and adrenaline and fun.
Defense Grid – a tower defense game with a dangerous high score system … The idea on these is that you have to set up the defense towers to beat back massive waves of enemies of increasing strength and the challenge is to keep enough in hand that you can stay ahead of what you need to stop them winning. I much preferred this one to the sequel.
Planetbase – a chilled out space colony builder game which suffers from very dumb colonist AI.
World of Warcraft – the open world exploration and questing is brilliant, with humour and fun all over the place. But it’s let down by the end game and the silly mechanics.
Battletech – I’ve been enjoying playing through the campaign again. The sad thing is, I know that it should have been better. There was a very solid table top game to build on and the stuff added by the developers just … isn’t very good. There is very little variation in the non story missions beyond “Drop and murder twice your strenght in enemies, repeat in next battle”.

That’s me list ! Crikey this one has gone on for a while.

Oh – small announcement – I’ve really enjoyed doing the April 1st posts over the last few years but I may well be skipping it this year. Brain feels melty, this weekend is going to be quite tiring and I’m not feeling the ideas I have so far. We’ll see if anything promising comes to mind over the weekend.

More random thoughts today !

I need to find some coherent themes for posts again. I’ve been struggling to find stuff to write about ! Also not drawn in a week either.

What’s been happening ?

Work’s been very busy, with me having good excuses to do some runs in the car to get to away trips. They’ve been mixed. Two trials were excellent, one was … mixed feelings and then there was a safety meeting. No one really likes safety meetings, although the alternative to not doing safety right is to have things happen with your kit like what’s been happening with Boeing’s 737 Max airliners lately. Nobody wants lives lost due to safety negligence to be on their conscience. I definitely don’t.

Oh eck, that was a bit of seriousness creeping in.

I help to support and test equipment that other people have to use later. I like to think that my efforts prevent other people from getting broken.

But yeah, getting out and about with work again has been great and the tiredness from long days (I’m 27 hours in credit on the flexi !) is being balanced from learning a huge amount on those away trips. Yep, I get a kick out of seeing what we deliver being used as we wanted it to be used and we deal with some quite unique exotic equipment.

Of course, that’s led to home time being either recovery from those long days out or concentrated chill out time. But …

Skyrim seems to have broken on me again. I run with a lot of diverse mods and the mods have either broken or stopped talking to each other … Oh well. This one is an odd one … Saturday was spent removing and reinstalling mods to try and fix it and I tried a reinstall of the game tonight, it’s more stable but those mods are talking to each other even less now. Ho hum.

Computers are weird. I actually observed one issue on the trial yesterday that could be closely related to why my home networking doesn’t work quite as intended here. Windows was never the most reliable thing.

Music wise and getting through the library, I’m approaching 3/4 through the library now. Only 4,745 songs (11.5 days) to go before I’ve listened to it all again. Getting there. The current album is Dreams, the greatest songs collection from the Cranberries. It’s a great album to listen to.

Back to that networking, I may have to get a new wifi router. I keep having to reset mine to keep things talking. I also got an email from my ISP saying that they’d changed the software on my cable modem. Without telling me. It’s supposedly doing more wifi tricks now, which I have specifically disabled because I don’t want the neighbours to be stealing my bandwidth via Virgin Media sharing my connection without my explicit consent. (The VM cable modem router is also really bad at rejecting interference of which there is apparently significant amounts around here)

Car’s doing great. And I have a suspicion that the last one had a broken power steering pump. The steering is much more fluid and smooth than in the last car. Oh and the front end has had suspension improvements too and lets you attack the corners with more confidence.

I’ve been losing days to Battletech as well. I’ve been rather enjoying playing that again, although I’ve hit that phase in the game where it gets pretty brutal. Bigger mechs appear with more weapons and it’s more likely that arms and legs get blown off your own people’s mechs.

Media ? I’m avoiding paying too much attention to the news because all of it just confirms what we’ve known for years. The people making the decisions in this country are utterly incompetent and self interested.

I’ve been really enjoying Star Trek Discovery again. The scriptwriters have been doing an amazing job of creating an exciting series with great characters where you have no idea what’s coming next. They’re borrowing ideas from old Trek, which is fair enough too and gives them scope for going straight to story with little introduction.

Ooo – feeling tired again now. I’ve given up on troubleshooting Skyrim for now, I’m probably missing something or missed reinstalling the mods correctly. It’s weird.

It’s videos at the moment with a HeyChrissa stream going on the laptop, music going to the hifi and game video catch up on desktop. I may pick up Embers of War again soon for more reading.

Last bit – odd phone stuff …

I picked up another charging lead on Monday so I could charge the phone in the car and … my original charging lead starts getting rejected by the phone with the claim “Stuff is moist, wait for it to dry out.” Very weird. It was fine to connect in the car yesterday although there’s weirdness with something called Mirrorlink. That’s supposed to allow the phone display to clone to the car display but … it just succeeds in locking out the phone and I can’t get anything on the car screen yet.

Need to disable that I think.

Closing out – tired definitely, needing some recovery time, definitely feeling burned out on the internet. But work has been having its moments and I’m taking the chance for some time off before Easter which should get me back to feeling good again. Outsides are definitely much closer to being fixed, although those last few bits to heal are frustrating.

PS Captain Marvel was a fun film to watch. Recommended !

Time feels like it’s going in a blur at the moment !

Mind you, last weekend was busy. Actually feel really busy at the moment.

Oh ! Thumbnail pic :

That’s the latest.

The hair is better. I’m still rubbish at faces. What’s on the skeleton needs work. I cheated on the bike wheels and pedals, plus the bike is not tall enough. (The bike is too long and shallow). I like the dog though. And it’s made people laugh. To get chuckles from people is the whole point of doing the drawing.

I’m steadily learning more about the Paint programme that came with the graphics tablet. I’m using a pencil tool to do the outlines, the hair highlights (and attempt at braids) and the freckles. The colouring is done via the airbrush tool. That’s one odd thing, the Painter programme is very much additive colour. Adding something on top of something else will change the colour of both, even if you’re working on different layers. That’s a big difference to GIMP, where something on a higher layer will cover up what’s below.

The Painter programme feels more natural to sketch in though, compared to GIMP.

Oh – this one was done at work last week after an incident where we lost our network connectivity.

Click for bigger as per usual. These were sketched in pencil over lunchtime (I had a longer than usual lunch in order to get that idea out of my head on to paper where it wouldn’t cause any trouble – ideas can be distracting). And then it was later digitised via the phone camera at home (hence the rubbish quality !) and you’ll probably detect where I was struggling with the paint tool in order to cover up the boomerang (supposed to be laptop!) that got turned into the keyboard and screen.

That’s enough of the pictures for now though.

Last weekend felt nuts !

Friday was spent having a quick wander through Cardiff on the hunt for music shops and other curious places. I didn’t find new music but I did find more sherbets. The sherbets have disappeared already.

I also learned to not attempt to escape Cardiff at 5pm on a Friday. You end up escaping Cardiff at around 6pm having not moved very much in the meantime.

And then I retreated my exhausted bones back home (via Sainsburys for a little recycling !) Ahh. Domestic stuff. Since I’ve been putting the plastic bottles in the recycling bins, my waste bin has needed emptying far less often by the bin men. The bottles used to go in there and they’re a decent amount of volume.

I may have watched 24 hours + of motor racing last weekend. The World Endurance Championship was a decent 8 hour race and the next day I was following the Lexus RCFs again in the 12 hours of Sebring at the same track. The two Lexuses decided to take bites out of each other though and didn’t repeat the promise they showed at Daytona.

And then there was the Formula 1. A decent season opener and it was good to see Valtteri Bottas emerging from out of the shadow. He had a really poor year last year. It’s sad to see what’s happened to Williams, from being up with the leaders, they’re now firmly at the back. You can pretty much expect who’s going to be fighting for the win in F1 but there’s usually a decent amount of interest down the field for what’s going on in the teams.

What else is going on – it was good to have the run in the car to Cardiff and back … and I’m getting longer shakedown runs later in the week too.

Random aside – it’s really sad to see the state of international cricket at the moment, he says after seeing yet another bowler resort to throwing the ball. Throwing has become endemic in international cricket. The door was opened with bowlers maybe 10 years ago getting away with the occasional throw … and now certain bowlers are doing it all the time. A blind eye is being shown. Dale Steyn was an incredible bowler when he started, now he throws the ball and is actually less effective for it. Lasith Malinga had a wonderfully weird slingy action when he started. Very round arm but definitely a beautiful example of how to bowl in a completely different way to how you are taught to. Now it’s like a javelin throw. It’s also less effective because the throwing means he doesn’t get the last instant boomerang swing any more.

And there are more in a similar vein too. It’s quite sad to see once great players have to resort to that either through injury or age. Bowling the ball means you can put a lot of spin on it, which stabilises it for seam movement and gives gyroscopic action which causes the ball to swing round corners if done right. Throwing doesn’t impart that spin on the ball.

I better stop whinging about that before the trolls find me !

Hectic couple of weeks coming up … then I’ll be escaping and chilling out for a week before Easter. Been feeling the need to take myself off somewhere and disconnect. The neurons feel a bit toasty. I do like to keep up with the various streams and communities though.

That’d be the fear of missing out ! Need to post more too 😀