Author: Sleepypete

It almost happened tonight ….

I did another bit of laptop scouting as part of “I’ve burned my own dinner the last few nights, let’s have someone else do that for me tonight” and headed off to the Mall again.

You can do internet shopping to check for prices but there is no substitute for getting your hands on stuff to see how they look and feel. And tonight, the result of the touch and scout were :

Acer – spongy trackpad. Incredibly unresponsive. I believe a tranquilized sloth would have been more responsive. This immediately drops them off the possibilities, spec will vary but keyboard, trackpad and often screen will be common across most of a company’s laptops.

HP – didn’t touch them this time. They have serious issues over quality and when I’ve looked before, their trackpads are better than Acer. As in, still very unresponsive. Sloth standard.

Dell – solid but uninspiring. Overall competent but the screen was dull. It’s like my choice of cars … if you can have Good or Excellent and Excellent is the same price, why do you settle for Good ? The Dell is Good.

Lenovo – one thing that the online reviews told me to look out for was screen quality and the Lenovo that I looked at had inconsistent bands of varying bright and dark across it. This is Not Good Enough and instantly confirms those online reviews.

This is a comment for the shop as well actually. If you put a laptop on display then customers will use it as an indication of quality of the product. If you permit a display piece to show obvious quality issues, then …. WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING AT !

MSI are too expensive.

The Asus laptop though … had the best features of all of the above. Nice keyboard, responsive trackpad, excellent crisp looking screen. (The other laptops had blurring, this was sharp).

(Essential disclosure note – I ain’t gonna be getting freebies from Asus any time soon).

You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about spec yet … Spec is a secondary consideration behind :
Quality – is it going to last, are bits going to HPfall off it, what is the user interface like.
PRICE ! Don’t spend too much.
Size – I do like the littleness of my Macbook Air but I’m prepared to sacrifice that for more capability out of the laptop and in this case, it’s more spec.

Ok – that’s the S word out in the open … Essential spec for me is :
Processor : i5 at least or AMD Ryzen. The AMD chip is only just starting to come to laptops though.
Memory : 8GB

More Megabites are good. Unless it’s a certain Costa coffee place that gave me a shortlived tummy bug on Friday. Nuff said about that.
Storage : Either SSD or SSD + conventional drive. I’ll need the space, so I’m looking at SSD + conventional as a minimum. Apparently the reviews don’t like the Hybrid SSHD solution very much … The speed and smoothness you get from having Windows on an SSD is unbeatable … (This is because around the time of Vista, Windows became very broken on disc caching and they haven’t fixed that yet)
And this one have good onboard graphics too. This wasn’t part of my original spec but … I’ve crept that a bit.

Yep. Nearly bought it tonight but I’ve held off. Maybe until the end of the week.

That speed thing is very important. People who are used to SSDs and are subjected to machines without them will know what I mean. I’ve reinstalled Battletech to my SSD and the difference is :

Conventional drive – go refill the coffee mug while it’s loading. You’ll have time.
SSD – update the iTunes tracklist, look back, it’s done. (I don’t update it much)

That’s the advantage of an SSD. It does this by being a memory device … and memory chips tend to be far faster at finding what you need than an archaic storage system that depends on magnetic chemical compounds deposited on spinning platters read by an arm that floats above the surface of the platters.

That’s the curious thing about tech – if you explain the practical nature of things like hard discs, people would go : Why is it done like that ? That’s NUTS ! But it works and it’s simple to make so it’s the cost effective option.

In other news …

I restarted my Battletech campaign at the weekend and so far they’re doing pretty well. I’m adopting the following strategy :
Pilots are going for Gunnery and Guts – they are very accurate with shooting the guns and they can take a lot of damage.
And this is a game that’s all about soaking up damage while dishing it out.
Lower numbers of BIGGER guns – because there is a skill that ignores the damage reduction if you shoot things with only one weapon. And a big gun means the damage is on one area instead of many, which means more chance of penetrating the armour and hitting something soft and squishy.
Getting the morale up quickly when it’s cheaper.
Doing more non-story missions to build up the characters and the money.

And … enjoying less downtime between missions when it’s loading stuff in ! Definitely enjoying it much more now that I’m not waiting for the game so much. I have joined the Meme Of Dekker though. He’s one of the Mechwarrior pilots that you start with and he gets put in a very squishy mech. You have to be very careful or he gets :

The Meme of Maim. And the AI in this game is merciless, if they detect a weakness then they will focus down that weakness and murder it. In this case, Dekker, in the lightweight Spider … with a headshot. It took 2 and a half months to repair that mech …

Not tonight though. The Battlemechs are in the mech bay while I finish off the latest event on Idle Champions. Hopefully Catti-brie has it in her to complete this mission on her own. And without it taking too long !

Oh and the rumour that there is a Red Dot Projector in this laptop is …. just a myth.

Despite procrastinating like hell over the Star Wars may the fourth weekend … I didn’t actually buy any Lego kits.

Well. It technically isn’t a kit :

It comes assembled and glued, so not-a-kit.

Nifty though. I may have bought something else little on there too but no kits this time. I’m still feeling a bit deprived of the Lego … (The new kits aren’t interesting and the offers weren’t good enough. I have no interest in the Y-Wing UCS kit and not enough interest in the Snowspeeder)

What’s happening ?

I’m needing another quiet weekend. Dunno why I’m so tired these days. I’m not getting as much sleep as I need, which is part of the problem. That’s a combination of staying up too late and more insomnia yawning into the pillow. I should address the first bit but I don’t have any good ideas for the insomnia.

Idle Champions has been keeping my attention for background play and then there’s the continuing adventures in Skyrim. The character can still be fragile but also hits fairly hard. I’ve learned the game better with this third character.

Red Shirts by John Scalzi is a book I’d recommend, although he is a massive troll with his endings. I have a Coda chapter of the book to go and then it’ll be figuring out what book 18 will be. An enjoyable read and I’ll be reading more.

I’ve reinstalled the Battletech to my SSD and I’m considering recording a restarted playthrough … Yep. Might record the gameplay thing again. This does feel like it will be a long drawn out campaign though.

Back to me and my outsides are definitely improving still, although they’re very delicate and prone to me redamaging them too much. But there is steady, consistent improvement. Hopefully when my outsides are better, the rest of me will improve too and I’ll get some of the energy back.

We shall see.

For the time being, finishing book tonight, dinner’s in the oven, procrastination will continue over laptop and I’ll have an easy evening with Idle Champions being started up when their weekend thing becomes active.

Oh wait ! Laptop :

I think my intended spec has definitely shifted, it’s just finding a manufacturer who will give me good quality with that spec. The idea is to look at what isn’t listed in the spec, to check if the value is in the quality rather than the bits. Because if they sacrifice quality, you get a laptop like my last HP which had really poor build and which lasted literally 10 months before expiring with a dead fan. (And I got done with the warranty there too).

So the new spec is still : i5 processor or AMD Ryzen, 8GB, SSD+HD, IPS screen. Gaming graphics.

The gaming graphics is the new item there and the gaming laptops seem to be higher quality too with more likelihood of having the SSD+HD combination. It’s looking like selling the soul to Windows as well, just to make the compatibility easier with iTunes. The iTunes software is just too important for managing the music library, although I refuse to use versions newer than 10.7.

Laptop probably coming in the Black Friday sales now, although I’ll keep my eye on offers. That’s the thing … don’t buy out of impulse, buy when it’s the best time for you to spend the money.

Back soon.

First up,

More books ! I finished reading those Last Legionary Of Moros books again. I enjoyed them yet again but more of that in a bit.

Yeah, it’s gone warm again today although I was in my pooter chair instead of being on the sofa. Back to work tomorrow again. Haha, admit it, how many of you resemble the picture above on this cold, warm and hot Bank Holiday weekend ? Probably more than a few.

I’m feeling the tireds again (already!) so I planned a quiet weekend again chilling out and intentionally not doing too much. Sooo …

Friday – work until lunchtime (I work extra in the week for effectively a 4.5 day working week … but will hang around on the Friday if tasks demand it). And then it was me disappearing into town for a lunch and a chill out wander around the centre. Didn’t buy anything but objective achieved. (The canteen at work happened to be closed so it was a wander in town or the local coffee shop. I should really check them out at some point).

And then a bit more chill out before heading out for weekend supplies and …. pizza. Pizza is good. It just happens that the better pizza shop is by the place I get my supplies from. Convenient.

Saturday had me watching the 6 hour race at Spa, among doing other things (like the laundry!). It was a good race. I’m wondering what will happen at Le Mans because the LMP1 non-hybrids were closer to the Toyotas than I expected. That could be good at Le Mans with the longer straights where the non-hybrids will have an advantage on the straights when the batteries on the hybrids hit their charge limits. And the rest of the field had good battles all day too.

That’s the thing about endurance racing, there are usually good battles all day and all the way down the field. They’re still very dependent on aerodynamic assistance for going around the corners but not nearly so much as Formula 1, which is wrecked (in my view) by the cars having their cornering performance severely hampered by following other cars closely. So overtaking is very difficult in Formula 1 and lessens it as a spectacle.

The weekend has gotten hotter as it’s gone too and I’m not one who subscribes to this theory :

I do tend to suffer in the heat. It’s much tougher to cool down than it is to wrap up warm.

Still, it’s cricket season so the rain will be back soon.

Lots of game playing has happened this weekend with Idle Champions occupying the PC a fair bit but also a few others :
Motorsport Manager – a couple of races and getting the Backmarker to Best achievement where you deliberately start a car at the back of the grid and come through to win. You need hefty superiority over the rest of the field to make that one work. One issue is that when you get that kind of superiority, the challenge and fun goes out of the game somewhat. Not many races left in this playthrough.
Skyrim – a little today and a few more quests done. My hybrid of a stealth archer and sword and board character is doing nicely.
Battletech – a few more missions completed, although I’m considering restarting my game so I can level the characters differently. I want characters who can shoot straight and I’m feeling that the current ones miss too much.
Kotor 2 – continues to be enjoyable escapism but it feels very linear compared to the original game and most Bioware adventures of its type. Maybe it’s just taking a while to crack it open.

Lego is intriguing at the moment. It’s the May the Fourth Be With You Star Wars discount weekend and I’m feeling deprived of Lego. I actually have a bunch of it but I want more. But I have no clue as to what I want to get. None of the sets on sale at the moment really appeal. I want the Star Destroyer key chain thing though.

Book ? Book !

Books 14, 15 and 16 are the second, third and fourth in the Last Legionary Quartet by Douglas Hill. This is a tale of Keill Randor, who is the last of his kind. The last Legionary of the Planet Moros. The rest of his people have been murdered by mysterious forces and our boy is out for answers and … revenge.

This tale is told over the first book and then :

Deathwing over Veynaa – a first infiltration of where the Galactic Warlord is attempting to influence a conflict.
Day of the Starwind – a race against time to accomplish a dangerous mission before all is swept away by extreme atmospheric conditions (massive wind forces) induced by the close approach of a wandering planet.
Planet of the Warlord – the conclusion of the tale where Keill finds his nemesis.

I’ve intentionally not said too much there to avoid too many spoilers but the books are still worth a read even after all these years. They are short and sweet. There is recap at the start … but instead of being chapters long (I’m looking at you Mr Turtledove !), the recap is done inside a couple of pages and then it’s into the story.

At just over 100 pages a book, these are quick reads but still pack a fair bit in. There’s probably more than enough here to fill out a miniseries or a 12 episode or so TV series. It’s good stuff where the action and the story rattles along at great pace.

They are dated somewhat by mention of things like magnetic tape but … these books were written in the early 80s when the compact disc hadn’t been invented and I’m not sure that hard discs were in too wide operation either.

It was good to go back to these old ones. I may read some of the other series written by Douglas Hill again soon too.

Time to disappear again now though into the remains of that long weekend. And I’m totally not about to watch a Brickbuilder video about the Lego Snowspeeder …

Maybe.

It’s a weird feeling isn’t it !

I think I’ve been a little more careful than I have been in the past with the buying of new games but I happen to have and be interested in playing far more games than I have time to actually play …

(if that’s your pic, please do let me know ! It’s awesome, I’d love to give you credit but the site Google sent me to isn’t giving any accreditation)

What are they ? And before I start, here’s the obligatory (it really is obligatory, you get in trouble for not disclosing freebies) disclosure that all these are games I bought with my own cash.

First up and getting the attention is the new Battletech game. I’ve mentioned this one a few times already, it’s a strategy game set 1000 years from now where you are the commander of a mercenary group of Mechwarriors. I’ve been really enjoying this one. The turn based gameplay gives me a chance to look, pause, ponder, juggle the playlist on the iTunes (this is Important!) and tell the people what to do.

It might help a little that there are big long pauses while the computer goes off and does its thing loading in the next mission or loading in the spaceship again. This was definitely a good preorder. It looks like they’ve introduced a huge amount of the scope possible in the Battletech universe and tabletop games and I’ve been enjoying testing out different configurations of Mech and Warrior. I’m currently looking to have a mixed team of Melee mech, Short range gun mech, Sniper mech and medium range slugger. Switching out for a second sniper might be handy and I’m probably running too much armour on the sniper.

This is what makes a strategy game great ! If there are a bunch of different strategies and they are all viable while keeping the challenge in the game. Challenge is fun.

Talking about strategy – Motorsport Manager is on the back burner but this one again is a game where it rewards the best strategy with better results in the races. Do you fuel long and use slower tyres in order to have fewer pit stops ? Your cars lap slower but lose less time in the pits. Or do you sprint between faster stops and pit more often. More time lost in the pits, less time spent for each lap. The optimum strategy is different according to conditions.

I kicked off a game of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2.

That’s actually from the first of the two games but the graphics are similar. Spartan, fitting the capabilities of the day and enabling a great story to be told. The two games are set a few thousand years before the Star Wars movie at a time when the Sith Empire is at war with the Galactic Republic. One of Bioware’s better games.

I’ve gone through the first area of Kotor 2 and quite enjoyed it. I should go in for more ! (If I wasn’t addicted to Battletech at the moment). It’s a good sign when you can go back to an older game and find it still very playable and not particularly aged. Although look at the 4:3 aspect ratio. That dates it. (Kotor 2 was released in 2004).

I opened up Skyrim again … A pretty game.

A not so old game, originally released in 2011. A massive game. A game you can lose yourself in with the side quests and completely ignore the main story if you want to.

I have 103 hours in Skyrim across three save games and 12 hours in the latest. The drawback of the game is that while the game world is massive, it doesn’t really change much outside of the monsters levelling up as you cut a swathe across the country. There is still huge amounts to do though. I should dive back in ! After Kotor 2. After Battletech.

Stellaris is on the back burner at the moment. The changes made in the 2.0 patch were a bit negative in my view and I’m actually tempted to roll the game back to 1.9.

The number 1 rule applies : If you are not enjoying something that is supposed to be fun, do something different that you will enjoy.

Surviving Mars is one that I definitely have to give more time to. I think this one came out at a time when I was feeling particularly burned out so it didn’t get the time it deserved for me to learn the game.

Duskers is another of those, where you play the last survivor of a doomed universe charged with figuring out just what in the universe happened to everyone else. This is a superbly atmospheric game where you are limited to working with unreliable, fragile drones.

And there are more games too.

Not enough time ! No gaming tonight as well (ok, Idle Champions is on but that doesn’t count). I’m watching the finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, there’s a Heychrissa stream going on the laptop, I’ll have gaming videos on in the background and I’ll be charging through the Douglas Hill Last Legionary books.

Have a great evening !

PS I totally won’t be looking up laptops. I am very tempted. I think the temptation is heavily due to it involving the learning of Linux again. Something new. Something not Microsoft or Apple.

2 books today !

I’m still behind on the 52 books after getting held up a bit on Revelation Space but I’m catching up again with the aid of a few shorter books. Totally not cheating.

The two books share something actually, they both lean well to being adapted into TV type series. One already has …

Book 12 is the 5th book in the Expanse series, Nemesis Games. I’m wondering where they are going with these books. I’m not convinced the authors really do know ! That’s not fair really, they’ve said there is a plan for the 9 books in the series and after that, no more. So the story should be all done and dusted in the next 4 books.

This one feels a bit like a bridging book. The style of the books has the chapters split up between central characters and in this one, it’s the crew of the Rocinante splitting up to do their own thing across the solar system while the usual star of the Expanse (the ship !) is getting fixed up. So whereas some of the crew can seem to be a bit bitpartish, they get their centre stage again in this one.

And it adds a lot of background to all of these characters while moving the background story on quite considerably with some earth shattering events and the emergence of a new power. The sad thing for me is that it does start feeling a bit contrived in the “How come no one spotted this building up ?” kind of way.

Still well worth a read though and I’ll be picking up book 6 at some point soon.

Not yet though … I’m reading a series of books from my childhood. It’s the Last Legionary Quartet by Douglas Hill, first published in 1980 through 1982. The edition I have is all 4 books together in one paperback.

Book 13 – Galactic Warlord opens with our hero and central character Keill Randor searching for those who murdered his world.

He is the Last Legionary of Moros, an elite soldier, quite possibly the best human soldier in the galaxy. Yeah, that sounds a bit contrived … this is a series mostly aimed at young adult so they do take far more liberties with the science side of the fiction than a series like The Expanse does. More believable than Trek or Star Wars though.

Anyway. This one sees Keill finding out about the great galactic conspiracy and teaming up with a mysterious group of scientists who save his life in return for him becoming their emissary.

I’ll be charging through reading the remaining 3 in the series, although I don’t think I have the prequel book which saw Keill growing up.

The Legionary series always struck me as books that would be ideally suited to a TV adaptation. You have a galactic conspiracy, you have the martial arts fights so favoured by TV now, you have space, you have scifi and the timing is well suited to telly as well.

Perhaps this will be the latest series of books to be mined for the telly …

Douglas Hill did more series too, his Huntsman trilogy telling of the aftermath of an alien invasion of Earth was good (we lost badly) as was the Colsec trilogy. He’s definitely aimed at young readers but Galactic Warlord has aged well in the 30+ years since I first read it.

Whereas some books overdo the description and end up padding out their books unnecessarily (I’m looking at you Revelation Space !), the Douglas Hill books are stripped right back to narrative while still giving enough description to keep you in the picture of what’s going on.

A great light read for a younger reader. (Although the Fraxilly Fracas was a bit pants)

I watched Infinity War today …

I’m not going to do the spoilery thing but that movie is a ride. An emotional ride. They pack a huge amount into it. And if I say any more it could definitely go into spoiler space !

The latest Jurassic World movie trailer was good though and I saw more trailer for the Solo movie before which makes that movie look very promising.

The temptation is for a laptop. Or is it for more books. You can never go wrong with more books. I finished off Expanse Book 5 last night. More about that in a future post (I like to do the variation thing, so no consecutive book thingy posts).

Not sure what’s next just yet. It could well be a Douglas Hill series called the Last Legionary of Moros. That series of 4 books takes me back to childhood and it’ll be curious to see how it holds up almost 40 years after the first book was published in 1979.

After getting back today, a few hours disappeared into the Battletech game. I’m enjoying learning its nuances as I get deeper into the game. (I’m not too far in yet). It’s a proper slug fest instead of being the much quicker, less detailed type of strategy game that people may have been expecting. This is no bad thing …

Poor Panda Avenger took a beating there but is almost back in the fight. Panda is a little battlemech so is likely to be nearing retirement as my Lance gathers heavier mechs. It’s handy having the little ones around because you can run them around, flank and hit enemies from the back where the armour is weaker. But the little mechs also pop very quickly when faced with enemy fire.

Striker Omega has replaced the Panda in the lance while the Panda is being repaired. Yep, more Pacific Rim inspired names.

What’s the laptop thingy ?

I saw something going on a clearance offer yesterday. It had a pretty decent spec :

Intel i5 processor, 8GB memory, SSD + HD, IPS screen, nice keyboard, 1050 graphics chip, Windows.

I think it was £750 which is quite affordable for me and that’s a tasty spec as well. Not too much to be silly, while still being capable of first person shooter type gaming which tends to demand good all round performance. But …

Intel i5 processor – want this. It’s the right level between just enough and too much.
8GB memory – considering that my desktop spends most of its time using between 5GB and 7.8GB, I’d see 8GB as a minimum.
SSD + HD – the SSD drive makes it fast, the HD gives it space. I have over 100GB in my music library now so a 256GB drive would get very cramped, very quickly. It’s rare that the laptop makers give the opportunity for both types of drive.
IPS screen – essential. They’re clearer and brighter than the older technology of display.
Nice keyboard – don’t underestimate this in a laptop. Sure, you can get separate keyboards and mice but … I don’t use those with laptops. The keyboard and trackpad that come with it have to be very good.

So that’s the good bits … what’s bad about it ?

I don’t game on laptops except in circumstances where I’d be otherwise incredibly bored. (In which case I’m watching the videos or reading on Kindle instead). So a 1050 graphics chip built in is a complete waste … at about £200 on the price of the laptop plus a knock on effect on battery life and heat output. Don’t need the graphics.

Windows is continuing to cycle down expectations of quality and increase the nervousness of things going wrong unexpectedly. A few months ago I wrote that my main dvd/bluray player app on my desktop had stopped giving out sound. I couldn’t fix that (it did do sound to my monitor … but not through my main speakers).

Turns out that the problem there was a rogue Windows update, as the sound is now back. (This is corroborated by seeing how other people have had problems which have mysteriously fix themselves on later Windows updates). Software as a service is only any good if it doesn’t interfere with what we’re wanting to use out machines for. At the moment, it’s Software as a Disservice. Windows just keeps breaking stuff.

So my next laptop is likely to be running some flavour of Linux. The make or break though is the music … I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to switch to playing music via a Bluetooth link but I need an equivalent to iTunes 10.7 and its Party Shuffle/iTunes DJ feature, an automatic playlist where I can queue up a bunch of songs and have iTunes pick out more random ones when the ones I pick run out.

Oh and it was also a laptop made by Asus, who in my opinion bought their reputation through relentless marketing rather than actual quality. I’ve been burned by Asus a couple of times before I switched to an Asrock motherboard and my mum had an Asus Transformer tablet which was just … rubbish and also broke within a year. It’s not just us either, I know of other people who have problems caused by dodgy Asus hardware.

So the laptop will stay on the shelf. Very tempting, actually too shiny for what I want/need.

I think that’s enough for now !

Great film;
Enjoyable game (even if I did have to save scum a few times tonight to save my pilot from injuries !)
Temptation …
Avoided.

If you’re buying stuff, make sure it’s what you need … which isn’t necessary what you want :-). After all, the price difference between that Asus laptop and the one I have in mind from PC Specialist (not-an-ad) is enough to …

BUY LOTS OF LEGO !

Remember what’s important :-D.

Perhaps a cheeky one this but …

It’s a 454 page art book !!! There were huge numbers of pictures but I think that counts.

What was it you ask ? I’ve done what you shouldn’t really do with gaming (again). Preorder. The game in question is the new Battletech game, where you are in charge of a Mercenary corporation hiring out your Battlemechs to those who are willing to hire you.

Have Mech, Will Travel.

I’ve definitely been enjoying the game so far and I have an EnterElysium episode going in another window. The Merc company is going well so far. I think in the last mission, it was my 4 against 2 enemies sure but we came out unscathed. Which means barrelling straight into the next mission. Tomorrow. Or Friday. Or at the weekend. Tired now so I’ve come out of the game.

Pictures ?

As usual, click for bigger.

The idea is, Big Robots, Big Guns, Lots of Missiles and a few lasers too. I really enjoyed playing Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries in my first years with a PC and MechCommander 2 was another highlight of a strategy game. Starsiege was a good one as well for Big Robot Fights, although that was set in another universe.

The book ?

I picked up the Digital Collectors Edition (disclosure note – I paid, wasn’t a free copy) which had the art book with it, plus a 60 track soundtrack. Lots of value there. What’s in the book ?

A decent amount of concept art;
Drawings for the stars of the show, the Battlemechs;
Building concept art;
Character art … including a few spoilers;
Spaceship art.

You can probably predict that I quite liked this art book. 454 pages !!! Of course I’m gonna like that :-).

I am knackered now though or I’d have stayed in for just one more mission … I’m in early days so far. I have managed to name my mechs though.

There we go.

Yeah, I need to work on my names and maybe even look up a few of the names from my last post. From left to right it’s :

Shadowhawk class : Peregrine Avenger
Blackjack class : Fury Iceangel, this is my character’s (Iceangel) ancestral mech so the name followed
Vindicator class : Zen Liberator, a few lasers
And the Spider scout : Panda Avenger

Too many avengers perhaps. And that movie is definitely one I want to watch before the spoilers come out. Maybe tomorrow evening depending on how I’m feeling !

Legoland is a possibility on Friday too. I have a bunch of flexi credit saved up and I don’t think I need to be in on Friday.

We shall see. For now though, Enter Elysium video, iTunes music, HeyChrissa stream and a bit more reading of The Expanse.

Oh ! Back to the games I abandoned at the weekend. I was finding them annoying and tricky to play. An interface that got in the way instead of being intuitive (especially with Satellite Reign !). I’ve gotten on well with the Battlemech interface so far. It’s properly turn based so it gives you time to do what you want to do.

That’s for another evening though. Back to the Kindle !

This post could go anywhere today.

Ooo ! Shinies !

I’ll start by saying that I’ve watched Ghost In The Shell tonight, the original anime version. There are similarities between this and the live action movie even going as far as nigh on replicating certain scenes. And then they’re both looking into the distinction between physical biological intelligence and electric artificial machine intelligence. If a machine becomes self aware, does that validate artificial intelligence ?

I have to admit that I preferred the live action version. There was a bit more to its story and I was taken in by the investigation of the backstory of the main character. I must watch it again soon. And I didn’t think that the main character absolutely positively had to be of Japanese type origin, as some fans of the anime would demand. That said, Rinko Kikuchi (Mako in Pacific Rim and that’s an IMDB link for you) isn’t in enough movies and she’s a little marvel. I think she would have made a great Major Motoko.

Talking of Pacific Rim and its Jaeger Mechs … The new Battletech game unlocks tomorrow and I may have pre-ordered it. I’ve been enjoying the Enter Elysium playthrough (youtube playlist link) and he’s been doing his traditional thing of naming his Mechs after people who subscribe to his Patreon. Naming things like that definitely adds something in games. It certainly gave me an attachment to my soldiers in the XCom games and a grin when finding a particularly good name in Elite.

What were the Elite ships again ? I finished in this ship :

The black Python known as Shipka 3.14159-Thon. My other ships in the game were (quick peek at the Inara page !) : Humility, Dignity, Algebraic the Adder, Ranger, Pathfinder, Dorothy Drake. Then there were the space trucks called Lisa Kelly, Art Burke, Alex Dewey. The ones named after the Youtube and streamer community people : Elizabeth Sparrow, Chrissa’s Potato, Katherine Of Space, Nik’s Hammer, Space Viking, Owner Jms Vas QwibQwib. And those named after people close like Queen Skye, Shaname’s Sword, Skye Searcher and there would have been a few more of those if I’d stayed with the game.

I think I’m done with Elite now. There isn’t enough variation or story in there to hold my attention. There is a feeling of having done everything in the game already and I’ve never been one to grind out the time in a game. There are better games to play that don’t involve grinding. So if you were looking for your name above, there were names like Queen Karen and Queen Jenny coming later.

But those are spaceships. One thing about Pacific Rim was the names given to the Mechs. They sounded probably epic and had a certain weight about them. Names like Gypsy Danger and Gypsy Avenger. Striker Eureka and Striker Omega. I think my Battlemech mechs need similar names. Let’s see :

Iceangel Alpha, Kitten Cyber, Yankee Tango (that may be tea related). Gorilla Demon (guess what album I’m listening to at the moment !). Keela Shadow. Space Viking could come out again. I know a streamer/youtube community that would love that. Iron Elysium. Curmal Ghost. Hopefully more names will come later. Crazy Queen is a good one too. Or Toller Bob for … reasons :-). Marine Dragon.

I’m quite looking forward to the Battlemech game. It looks like a cracker. I was hyped for Frostpunk as well, which comes out soon too. However with that one, as I watch more gameplay I get the feeling it’s another game I’d bounce off without playing much. I was doing that yesterday with short sessions in Satellite Reign and Rebel Galaxy before getting irritated and coming away from the games. Knights of the Old Republic 2 (Star Wars) held my attention a bit longer.

Enough about games. Deletion ?

There’s a lot being said about Facebook and the general slurping of data it has been doing since … day 1. The response seems to be to walk away from Facebook and delete everything they hold. I don’t think this will be particularly useful as they appear to have been cleaning up their act lately and complying to the various Data Protection things that are out there. And besides, most of your data will have been hoovered up long ago, plus you won’t have realised quite how much of your data is exposed to them.

Yes Facebook. If you pop up an advert on my laptop that is suspiciously related to something I looked at or searched for on my desktop, then you’re being very creepy. Make no mistake about it, there is an information war going on where the hackers, the Twit/books, the Googles are all looking to harvest our data for their own means.

So what can we do ?

The big thing is to be very careful about the picture we present to the internet. I don’t give my actual date of birth any more when Steam asks me, I give the year. If you take pictures with your camera or your phone, be very wary about location services. The place where you took the picture could be getting saved as metadata in the picture and that geotag data can be extracted later. I think I’m safe from this but I should really check seeing as I take pictures outside the front door. Of my house. This is why I never take pictures at work.

Geotagging is a real threat. My phone has popped up train times occasionally when the bus takes me past the train station. It’s not data that I asked for but in being Helpful, the phone tells me that it has been programmed to continuously monitor my location and use my data bandwidth to look up possibly relevant data. That’s part of what they call a digital footprint.

Be paranoid. We are being tracked and data on us is being collected without our express consent.

The thing to do is to not make it too easy for the people collecting the data. Think about what you share on Twit/book. If it isn’t something that you’re happy for a Crazy Random Internet Person to know, don’t post it.

A lot of the people who are saying “OMG DELETE FACEBOOK!” have done that a little too late. Their data from oversharing will have been harvested by the various apps that they and friends have allowed to have permissions.

That’s another thing – beware of the permissions that an app is asking for and if you’re the least bit suspicious, don’t allow them. I’ve backed away a few times from those Fun Post sites because I didn’t like the permissions they were asking for.

I’m not going to be deleting my Facebook. There are a few people with whom I value their communication immensely and my primary means of communicating with them is via Facebook. I’m not going to lose that due to the hysteria that says Delete Facebook. But I have considered it, mainly due to their policies on the News Feed. There are very odd algorithms at work there, posts you would expect to see are filtered out and random posts from advertisers are sifted in.

Twit/book has far too much advertising and not all of it is gotten rid of by web browser ad-blocking software.

I don’t pay as much attention to the news feed any more. There’s only so much that your attention can actively monitor. Trying to keep an eye on too much will lead to stress and madness. I realised a while ago that while I follow groups and people that I’m interested in, a lot of it is garbage and not worth my time. One of the Twitter accounts posts and reposts the same stories – scroll past. The Elite group on Facebook has been overtaken by idiots – scroll past but not before blocking the instigator of the troll post.

Haha, I thought this would be lots of random things about many random topics but it’s been :

Ghost in the Shell – enjoyed both. Understood and preferred the live action version. Yes I am a heretic and will burn in digital hell when they upload me.
Mechs and epic names for them – Ivanova Fury, Zen Liberator, Prospero Nimoy, Viper Apollo, Robinson Danger, Solako Grave. How many of those do you recognise ? 😀
And a bit about the dangers of Twit/book.

Don’t make it easy for people to find out about you ! Unless you want them to of course :-).

Watched Rampage tonight with the work-ish mob. Great film. Terrible film. Highly entertaining. You know the type, the story is so bad it ends up actually being great fun to watch. Recommended.

What’s the book ?

There we go. It was the Star Wars Galactic Atlas which is going cheap (ish) with The Last Jedi movie. It covers all of the movies up to (but not including) The Last Jedi as well as the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series. There are lots of artist drawings of the various planets that Star Wars has visited along with words about what happened there through the various series. There are a couple of character sessions too and a timeline.

I quite enjoyed barreling through this one last night. But this post isn’t really about a film or a book. Take another look at the picture. What lurks in the background …

Except for a hungry looking dragon. Keep your eye on that one, he looks like he’s up to no good.

Smile for the camera boys ! I think that’s all the BB-8’s I own (there might be another one somewhere …) A curious kit. There’s a lot of near duplication because he’s basically a sphere with a lid with the sphere calling for a lot of symmetry. There’s a little bit of movement with the kit with a lighter appendage that pops out plus the head rotates and tilts. Nifty.

Wait.

BB-8 – did you see what 4D did with your littler brethren ? Maybe if we click for bigger we’ll find a trace of them.

Mind you, 4D the dragon is looking hungry.

OH MY GOD. 4D ate BB-8’s head. SPIT IT OUT ! I shall have words with this one. He shouldn’t recruit friends (in the shape of my pug-like monitor duster!) to molest the Lego.

And there we go. It looks like the monitor duster got eaten as well and 4D is getting to grips with the next item on his menu. I don’t think he realises that Lego isn’t good for him and that it’ll only lead to bricks on the floor.

 It doesn’t look like we can stop him. That’s one hungry dragon. One side gone …

Both sides gone … When will this end ?

BB-8 your parts are showing. And that dragon looks far too proud of himself.

That’s an evil look.

Getting down to the bones now.

Not much to go now, just the mechanism to consume on the inside and the remains of his sphere.

 I think something in that mechanism disagreed with 4D and he’s gone off somewhere. I have a suspicion that he’ll be back.

BB-8 is more like BB-0.8 now.

Just a naked frame.

Can BB-8 be saved ? Let’s see. I’ve had words with the dragon now and he looks repentant. It sounds like he’s been busy in the background too.

We’re saved !

But it looks like BB-8 doesn’t trust 4D. That lighter is definitely not being brandished in a friendly manner …

I saw another of those memes today … and you could say it’s kinda triggered me if I allow myself to use that phrase.

(It’s overused as a phrase, people use it like I’ve done there to say it has provoked a vigorous reaction when triggered should really be “It brings a traumatic incident back to reality for me”. Nothing in games is traumatic.)

I won’t post the meme because it uses (a rather mild but anyway) swear word and it’s one of those all bluster, no justification thing anyway but here goes. What does it say ? What question is it asking ? Do you recognise yourself in the type of gamer under :

New School : Fortnite, PUBG, Clash of Clans, Far Cry 5, Overwatch
(Do you even know what they are ! I do and I have no intention of playing any of them – muahaha)

Old School : Modern Warfare 2 (call it a COD please, it’s a COD), League of Legends, Angry Birds, Black Ops 2, Bioshock Infinite.
Same again, I have no intention of playing any of those again except for maybe going into Bioshock Infinite. I actually own that one (it was a gift). For the others, LoL is far too toxic and it plus MW2 and BO2 are both sub par shooters that depend more on licence than quality.

Ancient Gamer : Halo 3, Gears of War, COD4, Fallout 3, Portal.
I avoided Halo (because it seemed like a cheap clone of most sci fi shooters), I played the first Call of Duty. And Fallout 1 and 2. I own Portal but have never played it (it came with the Half Life 2 Orange Box).

Nope. My gaming dates back far longer than these. I am …

Dinosaur Gamer and Proud.

(Picture is courtesy of a DeviantArt artist, here is a link to their Deviantart site. I thought that pic was amazing.)

Where other gamers play things like Far Cry 5 now, I grew up on Doom. And Doom 2. And Quake. And yes, we had the odd deathmatch of Doom over the house LAN while I was a student. Running Novell Netware … IN DOS ! With the whole thing of managing the memory through the Config.Sys and Autoexec.bat.

Mind you, those were understandable, unlike the extreme vaguaries of Windows 10 these days. Software as a Service doesn’t work particularly well. Just give me a stable foundation, yes make it secure … but don’t change the fundamentals of device management on a whim because you then just break the applications that run on top of that.

Yes. While the racing people play games like Burnout, NFS Payback, F1 2025, Dirty Rallyer, Project Cars, Gran Turismo 16v or the others, I cut my teeth on Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. The first one in 1998. With a joystick as a controller. And then there was a quick look at the precursor to the F1 games, the original Geoff Crammond’s Microprose Grand Prix. And … as further evidence of being a Dinosaur Fossil, I cut my teeth on Revs. This was on the BBC micro. OFF TAPE !

Here is some gameplay footage of Revs. GLORIOUS ISN’T IT !

Quite.

I can’t think of shooter games on the BBC. The first I was really aware of was Wolfenstein 3D on the PC. I skipped that one for Doom. There is such a thing as too much nostalgia, some of those early games were junk.

Talking of junk, I played Football Manager …. when it was first Football Manager ! This was on the BBC again. Sports Interactive later came out with Championship Manager which was excellent in its 1993 and CM2 versions. CM3 was garbage and it wasn’t playable again for years. Probably not until it turned into Football Manager again after licence issues.

There’s another thing. Dinosaur gamers didn’t have patch support. A game either worked properly on day one … or it was buggy as hell, people found out and it joined the ET game in landfill. I think I was around when ET came out, it was definitely a film that I saw with my dad and brother. That comment needs a pic.

Miss ’em. Love ’em.

When it comes to flight simulators, I need to look at these again. There’s something to coaxing an aircraft through the sky and OH MY GOD WE’RE GOING TO CRASH LAND that you don’t get in a space game. Well, unless it’s Elite Dangerous and a high gravity planetary landing and then it’s the opening scenes to the Serenity movie again.

I keep looking at X-Plane and Flight Sim and looking backwards, there was the Typhoon sim. Nice flight model, nice visuals for the time, everything else was garbage. Falcon 4 though, that was incredible. Faithful flight model and equipment modelling plus an incredible living campaign and map. Great stuff. I also enjoyed Falcon 3 and … Fossil alert …

More Youtube footage, this time of a game called Aviator. And apart from the monochrome wireframe graphics, modern flight sims share a lot with this one. Well. They share a heritage like we share a heritage with ameoba.

You can do it !

Where was I. Hmm. Getting distracted by my dinner which is now rapidly cooling. Oops.

I’m a big strategy gaming person too. Before Stellaris there was a cluster of other games that didn’t really stick with me. Because … there was the forerunner. And the forerunner to that. I’m talkin’ about Moo. Master of Orion and Master of Orion 2. (We don’t talk about the third game).

That’s what I’m talking about. (Stellaris looks much better and I really should properly check out SoaSE and AI War).

I played the original Shogun Total War ! And it was a good game too, albeit with a few oddities in its logic. (Routing troops were very dangerous supermen, you didn’t get in their way).

I am a veteran of Civ 1. Version 1 ! And then there is Elite, Frontier Elite 2 and now Elite Dangerous. With a side excursion into X-Beyond the Frontier too (I’m thinking about checking out their newer games too because Elite Dangerous isn’t really making me want to play it more).

Elite brings me to one last one. I missed XWing but jumped into PC gaming with Tie Fighter. And then later with X Wing vs Tie Fighter, a multiplayer game well before its time. I think we were still using dial up modems then but it was one of the first and very well sorted too.

A very last one and this is hopefully an actual screenshot I’m about to find :

Vanilla WoW and proud.

Be Dinosaur. Be Proud.

I’m so proud I got the t-shirt. (And my bedroom light is very yellow apparently).

One very last thing, it’s a great friend’s birthday today. Here is a song :

Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday fellow dinosaur;
Happy birthday to you.

And that’ll be me running after the person who that song is for sees it.