Author: Sleepypete

Well,

Maybe not quite a week. There might be cricket to be watched tonight and the Formula 1 season is starting again. Plus more to do in the week. Oh ! Don’t forget :

Yep. At least one of your clocks is getting to that time when it’s correct for half of the year. My plan is to stay up tonight to watch the cricket and the motor racing. As per usual, I’m not convinced that the plan is going to go that way …

Let’s see :

I had planned to be out of work and into lazy mode by about 1.30 yesterday. It didn’t quite work like that. I’m usually later in on a Friday (although I still have to be careful to get to the car park before it is full) but with the time credit I build up during the week, usually escape much earlier. I ended up escaping at about 3.30 having had zero lunch along the way. Oops.

Things were getting done, stuff was being sorted and pins were being pulled out of grenades (not enough stuff was being sorted by other people). But that’s work and I don’t like to talk too much about what I do at work on here.

I’ve been looking to keep up with the cricket and the motor racing … the cars have been good, race tomorrow will be interesting. The cricket ? Let’s just say I fast forwarded through a lot of rain overnight. I may be having other things keeping my attention overnight.

Another part of the plan was pizza …. cos if I’m not intending to sleep then I may as well indulge that other guilty pleasure. If I’m not sleeping then the acid isn’t so much of a problem.

Pizza wasn’t great. First they forget the order, then they redo the order and quite possibly rush it through the oven. Never rush food … it comes back to bite you if you do. I’m pretty sure it was undercooked and I’ve ended up only having half of it. (This was from the place I can walk to and back before the pizza goes cold)

Yep. Week off this week, before Easter. This time of year always feels like a bit of a grind to get through to Easter. It’s probably the dark nights and the cold. People are partly solar powered I reckon. Oh and it’s also performance reporting season, which is something I detest.

The original caption on that was something like “Day 37 and they suspect nothing”.

I think I have some of that imposter syndrome thing. I’m pretty good at what I do but I have a really hard time believing that outside of things people say. Perhaps the humility behind that is part of being good at what I’m doing ?

Maybe.

It does help when I get feedback. Things like the Space Dwagon logo, the feedback I’ve been given on that has confirmed that it met its aim – of going for the cute. I like making cute things. It does help when I have ideas to drive that though. It’ll be good to see the icon on stream as well later in the week.

But I would like to make logos for more people though and I’ve only had a 50% strike rate there so far. Or is it less. I must get the 2 “Yes pls” logos into a mod.

That’s something that gets me down and messes with my head actually. I like to do things for people, show them things that I hope gives them pleasure or other happy feelings. So when someone says “Oh yes post a link!” and when I post the link, no one looks at it …. that’s not good for my head.

I try and keep my head pointed the right direction by focusing on those who appreciate the gift of something happy and …. what’s the right kind of phrasing …. be wary of those who ignore the gift.

You gotta look after yourself you know ? And for me that means concentrating on the good ones and avoiding the toxic, the rude or the …. apathetic.

Gosh, this one is going in a weird direction. I feel like I should be reaching for one of those “Stop typing now!” pics :-D.

Plans :

Watch the cricket and the motor racing;
Chill out as much as I think I can get away with;
Listen to a tonne of music;
Enjoy a load of videos;
Maybe play a few games;
Perhaps getting on the road for Special Things;
Talking to wonderful people over coffee;
Devouring tasty chocolate things shaped like eggs
Definitely get reading again.

I’ve been stuck in Revelation Space for a little while now ! Someone did give me some good ideas for an upcoming post though. We shall see where that goes :-D. (It involves playing more of a particular game).

Gosh I must be really tired !

My body tends to do this to me. It’ll find out from some part of my brain that I have a break coming up and start shutting down in advance. 3 and a half days to go at work until I have a week off. Definitely need it …

I notice it in the unnecessary errors I start making. Like today when I combined two people’s names without realising or when I attempted to pay for a bacon bun when I actually had a sausage bun. Perhaps my brain really wanted bacon instead of sausages.

Surviving ? Yep. I’ll hang in there until being able to disappear for a while but the tricky thing this time around is preparing other people for things we’ll probably need them to do while I’ll be away. And maybe …. for what comes after. I’d like to get back into the creating side at work instead of the supporting side. (Can’t say more than that here).

I’ve been trying something else to do with surviving too …. Because my brain is broken I didn’t have an extended look at this one at the weekend but it was an enjoyable start.

That’s my early base in the founder phase. The game is built around you setting up the foundations of your base with unmanned drones, then a small number of people move in and when you prove that they can stay alive, you can pressgang more people in. They are willing applicants. Although they may have been threatened with something dire by Niki the producer.

The problem I have at the moment, a problem I have with a lot of new games actually, is that I need that certain amount of brainpower to figure out the game mechanics and how to exploit them or work with them. In this case, the base is probably a little too spread out in the earliest phase and I acquired a few buildings too early before the staff was available to keep them running.

You play, you learn, you enjoy the lovely graphics :

That’s not the in game graphics, it’s the same image as the first with their cover art filter applied. I suspect I’ll be treating you all to some more good looking screenshots in the future. Games definitely look a lot better than they used to.

That’s an old one called Moonbase Commander.

Other stuff ? On Friday, I needed an afternoon of not doing much apart from eating popcorn in front of a non-intellectually challenging movie. The movie of choice was Tomb Raider ….

I think Alicia Vikander has as much fun in this one as Angelina Jolie must have had when she did Lara Croft. And the fun they have on screen translates to fun for the viewer. I enjoyed this one as much I did the first two movies. Although Rhianna Pratchett should really be given full writing credits due to how much of the plot for the first reboot game was borrowed for this movie.

I watched Annihilation tonight. A much more cerebral film than Tomb Raider but that was never really in doubt :-). An interesting movie, probably not one you should watch while eating your dinner. Oops.

I thought they were both good movies, for far different reasons in each case. I’ve also started watching Star Wars Rebels, which definitely has my attention.

Back to Surviving Mars though and I think I’m going to be learning modding more for this one. And maybe applying that over to Stellaris as well. What I’m looking at is customised logos, things like that.

I’m curious what people’s thoughts are for this :

That fella would appear on the side of all of the rocket ships and in the other areas where the colony logo appears.

What do people think ? More mods ? Got an idea for a logo mod for me ? (Comments are below or there’s the Twit/Book posts) As is usual, I’ll learn more as I go on and create more. I do like the message dwagon pic but I think I need to get another copy of him, as this one is a bit grainy and I’m not so keen on the lighting in it.

One for when I see the mum again ! This one is a Happy Mother’s Day pic. I’ll be heading back there at some point, maybe not Easter, definitely in birthday season.

And hopefully fighting the brain burn out to bring you another post or two ! I have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of typos that needed to be correctd while ytping this post out.

You know sometime, I’ll have to get that headset out again and actually try recording some of these parody songs.

Daft post tonight …. Surviving Mars is out tonight, which I’ve been quite looking forward to. The pre-release streams on the ParadoxExtra with Susie and Nikki of the publishers have been particularly enjoyable. (Here’s the link to their playlist again)

Anyway, Nikki mentioned that she’s listening to more heavy metal music lately and …. that triggered the “let’s rewrite a song into a parody” thing again.

Here goes :
The Martian Immigrant Song

Ah-ah, ah!
Ah-ah, ah!

We come from the home of the pa-ra-dox
From the planet Earth, where the pizza’s cold
Managers of people
We’ll drive rockets to red Mars
To build the domes, and rush the babes
Mysteries, I am coming!

On we seek with rover drones
Our only goal will be a perfect dome

Ah-ah, ah!
Ah-ah, ah!

We come from the home of the pa-ra-dox
From the planet Earth where the pizza’s cold
How fine your dusts so red
Can whisper “look meteor”
Susie the host, Nikki controls
You are our overlords

On we seek with rover drones
Our only goal will be a perfect dome

So now you’d better stop and come join us on Mars
For Nikki’s dome will rule the sol despite of all your lazing

Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh

Here’s a link to the Led Zep original of Immigrant Song (you may recognise it from Thor Ragnarok where I was most definitely head bopping along to it in the cinema).

I also rewrote another classic lately for KatherineOfSky, warlord of the Factorio wastes. This one was based on Run To The Hills by Iron Maiden (another link to a youtube version)

Woman came down from the sky
She brought us smoke that made us cry
She killed our blues she killed our nests
She took our dead for her own need

We fought her hard we fought her well
Out on the plains we bit and spit
But still she came with tank and flame
All our colonies will be tamed?

Jumping through ash clouds and barren wastes
Broken tree limbs on the plains
Chasing the robots back to their ports
Biting them in their own game
Murdered for freedom the nuke sneak attack
Woman and turrets and lasers ransack

Run to the hills, run for your lives
Run to the hills, run for your lives

Orange warlord in barren wastes
Hunting and nuking her trade
Mining the iron and stealing the fish
The only good trees meet grenade
Cracking the fuel and being a pest
Destroying the worms and erasing their nests

Run to the hills, run for your lives

Can’t beat those classics. But sometimes you can improve on them. I’ll leave you with a link to a Weird Al parody based on American Pie. Here is “The Saga Begins“. It’s brilliant.

PS Too tired to open Surviving Mars tonight but I did enjoy listening and watching to the Susie and Nikki launch stream.

I wonder how many other people dream of that ?

It’s one reason why I have enjoyed the Expanse books and series so far. There is a lot of science fiction in there that has a very solid foundation in science fact. Including how they apply real world physics, chemistry and biochemistry to the moon bases, planets and space ships in that world. The technology is quite far in advance to what we have now but … it’s set a few hundred years in the future. I think that allows them to factor in a few innovations along the way and most of those are extensions of what we have now.

Why moon bases ?

Could be Planetbases too and that’s a game I reopened today for a little while before feeling a bit too much of the tireds, closing it again and turning on the videos. I’m really looking forward to a new one coming called Surviving Mars. But first … Planetbase.

You start with a basic lander, which after it lands isn’t going to go anywhere. The lander has a few crew with specific jobs and a very limited amount of resources. This lets you build a starter base :

And your starter base will have power generation, batteries, water collectors, oxygen generators, a farm, a small factory, a dorm and a canteen. I’ve put bits of graffiti in the picture above that might need a click to make it big enough to read.

The idea is to manage the production chains so that your colony prospers and grows. The production chains are things like :
Everything needs power which comes from Solar, Wind or Lightning. The planetoid above is an airless moon so it has solar power only, no wind. Other planetoids have dense atmosphere which limits solar or storms that damage domes and any colonists outside who are hit by them.
Planets become food and starch for building.
Mines (hidden behind the smaller solar panel) provide ore with the ore and starch being turned into bioplastic and metal for use elsewhere.
Colonists need sleep and food so there’s a dorm and a canteen.
Not in the above but there are labs that make medicine and more production facilities that make robots and you can add in a gym to make colonists and visitors happy and a bar that will actually kill the colony.
I’ll also build a special spaceport area with lots of landing pads and many airlocks so that the people don’t have to queue up (this is a major problem when trading).

I hadn’t got to that stage in the colony above (spot the lazy worker watching the telly instead of working on making ore into metal – grr) but the depth keeps going a little more than the above.

I found it an interesting game to play. If I continued the game above, I’d need to build a lab quite quickly in order to make fake meat for burgers. Yep. A colonist who dines on Mars Burgers is a happy colonist. There aren’t enough biologists to make that happen though, the farm dome there is the smallest available and the one supplied biologist can’t maintain all the plants in it if it’s full.

I could go into it more, I’ve actually completed all of the available achievements in this game. There are issues with it, like the colonists prioritising everything else over making medicine. Not good if all of your workers have broken bones from the mines or you have an outbreak of Fork Disease (malnutrition) if your people aren’t getting their Mars Burgers.

If you hang in there through to the end stage, this is what the colony can end up like :

Lots of people. And yes they’re having a bit of an overcrowding related oxygen crisis. It models how the air moves around. Even if you have extra oxygen generation capacity for the colony overall, too many people in one place will take up all of the oxygen. It’s part of the challenge.

Anyway. The next game is Surviving Mars, which I’m looking forward to. It looks like a very nicely developed construct of a game and Nikki and Susie of the ParadoxExtra developer streams (youtube playlist link) show it off extremely well. It’s out tomorrow.

(not-an-ad, honest !)
(you have to put these disclosure notes in occasionally)
(but I am honestly hyped for it)

I sense I’ll actually maybe hold off until the weekend before diving into a Surviving Mars playthrough. After doing other things for the last couple of nights (and being tired after the weekend) I probably need to actually do supplies shopping tomorrow. And Friday is quite possibly an afternoon in town. Definitely for lunch. Maybe for a film. And popcorn.

Popcorn is good. Dunno what film it might be though.

Maybe it should be a dvd/bluray instead ! I have the perfect one.

It stars Matt Damon. Can you guess what it is ?

Wow, is it really 11 days since I posted last ?

That’s a little too long. I like to keep in the habit of making posts and one of the aims for this year is to easily make 100 posts. I’ve done that for the past few years, although 2017 was mostly by the virtue of going nuts with the Advent calendar in December.

I did like the pattern of writing less but more often. Hopefully you liked that from the point of view of the reader.

What have I been up to ?

Burying myself in work as per usual;
It’s coming up to Easter and I’ll want to get everything in a good state before I disappear for a week. There’s a combination of not wanting to worry about stuff while I’m away plus not wanting to leave work for others. Cos it’s bad if other people have to do my work for me. I don’t like that.

The way my system sets itself up is that I’ll dip into the hyperactivity while at work and then the cost of that is to crash in the evening and weekends. And I can only do it for so long. The Xmas to Easter run seems to be a particularly tough one probably as a combination of the duration of the period and the lack of daylight. People are partly solar powered I think.

Especially as the sunnier times of the year are when the cricket can be watched (in sensible hours, I probably won’t watch much of the NZ vs England tour).

What else … games …

I’ve been quietly addicted to the Idle Champions game again. It’s playing at the moment while I tap this post out and watch a stream and video while the music is on. That’s probably a bit too much going on to be honest but you can leave the idle clicker game to do its business in the background while you do other things. They’ve gone as far as they can go in the present run, so they’re picking up money. I could even run it overnight. I don’t think I will though.

I was thinking about doing another Planetbase run and recording it …. probably too late now, it would have had to be a weekend because a full base run is about 20 hours. I’d compress that for a video. Anyway, Planetbase is due to thinking of another game coming soon called Surviving Mars, which could well be an exceptional game and right up my alley for building a colony on Mars. It’s a bit contrived in places though, like in its highly accelerated time for people living. It’s not a game over years, it’s a game over days … or Sols.

There has been more Lego and the pictures will come in a later post. I have a 4th Millennium Falcon … no not that one, a smaller one. It was a quick build but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

That arrived as part of being a vulture with Toys R Us and Maplin. Both stores are in closing down procedures, basically they charged too much for what they sell, didn’t keep up with changing trends (or consciously went against them!) and people went elsewhere with the consequence that both big chains will disappear or shrink into a more commercially viable form.

But that means that now there are discounts and potential shinies to be had. Except even with the discounts, they were more expensive than the shops down the road. Oh well.

It was also a Mothers Day weekend here and a bit more involved than usual … Instead of going to the parents place, I drove to where mum lives on Friday, over to the sister’s on Saturday, Mothers Day things on Sunday, back to mum’s place on Sunday night and back to Bristol on Monday. And visiting :

That’s Murph the Slurp. He’s very friendly. Bit more scared of things than he should be maybe but quickly went into full on slurp mode. He has a sister/not-sister called Ice who is a big ball of fluff.

Very interested in my toes for some reason. My knees got checked out as well.

(I think both of them were investigating how I might taste. I may yet get eaten by dogs ….)

Just kidding on that. Icey seems to have a lot of anxiety along with the big ball of floofiness, which means they have to keep her isolated away from other people and visitors. She defaults into a perceive threat -> attack response. Normally I’d be reasonably rough with dogs. Not hitting them of course but definitely giving the fur a good bit of ruffling. Playing with them. But only up to the point where the dog is still having fun. If the dog is not having fun then it’s abuse and you don’t want to subject pets to that.

Dogs like interaction with people. They enjoy you playing with them (or they wouldn’t come back for more!). You can’t do that with Icey as a stranger but I suspect with more visits, Icey will end up favouring me with as many slurps as Murph does. It was getting close at the weekend :

Some animals you can be a bit rougher with. Vigorous belly rubs and things like that. Other animals you need to give a bit more time with. Dogs are naturally curious. If you approach them when they’re not ready, it’ll scare them and you’ll get that perceive threat -> attack response. We’re bigger than they are and they understand body language differently. If you let them approach you, let them give a gentle investigative sniff, that will open the way to the trust for the stroking and the belly rubs.

Unless it is a badly trained dog and then you want to be ready with the crossed arms over the chest to ward them off and definitely more wariness with that outstretched hand for them to sniff. But that’s not Ice and Murph.

Looking forward to meeting the doggypair again at some point. I don’t often find myself in that area though.

One last pic ?

Yes Murph that is your best side and you are definitely a handsome fellow.

(His gave may or may not have been drawn to CAKE in this picture. I can neither confirm nor deny any rumours about that).

It’s good to be around dogs who are part of the family again. I do miss the old fellas.

Scruff looking forwards to a good bit of ruffling. He did like a good throat and belly rub.

And Ben loving life like he loved people. And like how he loved treats.

(Also Goldie the athlete dog but I don’t have any pictures of the golden one)

Last bit – still aiming for the 52 books, although I’ve kind of stalled lately with Revelation Space. It seems to be taking its time to really get going.

Well. Not yet at least. It’s coming down heavier now than it was yesterday.

Could be bad later but the power is still going well, I’m warm and can get warmer via kettle and heating and more layers. I’m ok. I’m sparing a thought though for all those people who did brave the conditions. They’re unprecedented. I can’t remember snow like this since the family moved back from Northern Ireland. We lived out in the country over there and would get the weather from the Atlantic first, whereas the rest of Britain is partially sheltered by the island of Ireland.

I was working from home for a second day running today, which actually works ok outside of not being able to haunt people’s desks with a hangdog look when you need them to do something for you. That’s done now, which means ….

That’s a lot of Imperials …. How will BB-8 escape !!!!

That’s how it looked out the front door this morning. Didn’t look too bad, although the 2d of the picture and the flat snow belies how it was starting to drift into more significant clumps.

This lower angle from the front door shows it a bit more clearly. Yep. The snow is above the level of my front door. Boots essential …. And that drift before the pavement proved very fortuitous for … fun :-).

Battle had commenced, with the massed Imperial Walkers advancing with just one plucky Rebel attempting to foil their attack.

More battles were underway as well. Who would come out on top between this snow speeder and the Tie Advanced ?

I hope they’re taking note of the curious way the air is molding the snow … It doesn’t show up that well here but the wind has been carving shapes in the snow to allow the air to pass between the drifts and the obstacles. As the gap closes, the aerodynamic effect means the air goes through faster and in doing so, shifts the snow. It tingles my engineer senses.

Conditions on the roads are quite treacherous as well. Perhaps pod racers would get more traction on this than cars.

Definitely in that car park. (The cafe is open but not the shop)

This roundabout was definitely having its way with the people negotiating it. I saw a car go sideways multiple times as they were going too fast around it plus a Beemer needed a push because …. too much power not enough brain.

A lonely bootprint. WHAT COULD IT MEAN !!!!

And a path I have rarely trodden before today.

The going could be best described as Heavy going on Chance of Deathslip.

And …. I do believe that driver is obeying the speed limit. THEY SHOULD BE REPORTED FOR DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR !!!!

How are those battles going ?

Maybe Vader someday later now he’s just a small fry is ….. winning. Could go places that little one.

The Imperial learns that they should not have brought a starfighter to a battle in the snow when the Rebel had a snowspeeder. One more unwise pilot crashed in the snow.

A snowboard emerges !!! BB-8 will leave them in his wake with that.

I had a good walk around the neighbourhood earlier but as the snow was coming down heavier again, the homing instinct was kicking in pulling me home. By the time I arrived, the fresh snowfall had already nearly erased the evidence of the earlier impromptu photo session.

Stay safe everyone ! If you can avoid it, don’t travel in this. It’s hopefully unnecessary for you and if you have conditions like around here, the chances of getting caught out are far too high. (From someone insane enough to travel when I definitely shouldn’t.)

Stay safe, stay warm and I hope you enjoy the snow if you get a chance to.

Haha – don’t worry about me.

I did need to get a few feelings out last night but it’s not that kind of bottle. Honest. And there ain’t no way I’m going to be hitting this particular bottle, I would be finding Lego bits for months with my feet afterwards. Ain’t no one wants to be finding Lego bricks with their feet :-).

I think we need a teaser pic for that there thumbnail thing … Here we go. As always, click for bigger and I do believe the desktop version of these pages includes ….. a slide show …..

Looks good doesn’t it ? Even in the yellowy light of my old photo taking spot. (The main room light has a glass cover that makes the light a bit dim and definitely more yellow than it should be).

That’s the aft castle taking shape at the start of the build. It’s quite incredible how much detail they packed into something so small.

The main hull takes shape, ready to accept masts and sails. It’s only about 3 inches long and 4D was definitely needed to help with angling the ship to make for better pictures.

Another view of the side of the ship. I do like the gun ports and mini cannon hidden within.

Steady as she goes, don’t let those pirates get away.

But this kit isn’t just about the ship. There’s a bottle to craft too. This is the base starting to take shape.

And the ship starts to get enclosed in the bottle. This is still Lego, there are a lot of small pieces that fit together wonderfully well to make something … well you’ll see later how spectacular this one looks when complete.

Almost there … This is the stage where you pour in the “sea”, which is actually 284 individual one circle dot bits of clear blue Lego.

And this is where I shift location to my new photo shooting spot. My pooter chair with the reading light above ! Much better lighting.

And another angle.

4D kinda looks impressed there doesn’t he in his leaning back pose ? Darn straight. That’s the completed bottle. I thought there might be a case of SQUISH at this point with lego going everywhere as the top of the bottle went on. Happily no SQUISH occurred.

Looking shiny ?

Something that shiny needs something to display it on and I was impressed by how tight this article is. And there’s nice detail there too with the sign, the compass and the two rotating globes.

That’s missing something isn’t it …. I did like the brainwave of hiding the dust on my chair by using a map. I thought a bit of the South Coast would be a suitable backdrop.

There he is ! Looks pleased doesn’t he.

And if 4D asks me to draw him like one of those French Dwagons again I will …. get the camera and post it of course.

Last one. A spectacular looking kit. Not sure if it’s worth the asking price ? Maybe. It does look amazing though.

If you want to see more build, here’s a link to the video from Mr Brickbuilder. And I promised someone that I’d give them a link to the old Falcon build as well. Link !

Cya soon.

PS (Addon) Link to the Lego page – this is the Lego Ideas Ship in A Bottle.

Randomness today.

It feels like my brain needs to work through some stuff and I need to get that stuff out of the way before better posts can come again. But first …. a teaser ….

The leviathan wakes ?

Perhaps. Those pictures are for a later post.

Yeah, my brain is in a curious place at the moment. It’s as if it’s forgotten how to get joy. I think I know what’s going on :

My conscious mind is fine. My unconscious mind is grieving. So while I can function and on the surface be my usual non-serious joking self, I’m not getting any joy from that or from what I’m doing. It’s like going through the motions of what I’m usually like. People have mentioned that I look under more strain than usual.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, where my perception of something I’m watching or doing is coloured by how I’m feeling at the time. I’m happy – the film is amazing. I’m sad – the film is boring and poor.

It’s a phenomenon that I need to watch out for in myself. A kind of reinforcing feedback loop that makes a poor mood worse or in the other side of it, makes a happy mood into something where I can be a bit too much, too hyperactive and upset people who aren’t ready for that. I’d rather be happy bouncy than sad though.

I do feel a little odd though that I don’t fall apart with grief like what the expectation seems to be. But then that’s people dealing with it in their own ways. Our family is more about keeping going in adversity than having adversity stop us doing what we want to do. But I still have that guilt in me that suggests I should be grieving more. The little voice that suggests that something is wrong with me for not grieving more. I still grieve, just in my own way, with memories that are still clear and knowing my brain, will still be clear for decades to come.

Enough of that :-).

I got back on Friday night, indulged in a pizza (it was due), didn’t have the ill effects when sleeping that I often get with pizza (hurrah!) and started a new Stellaris game.

There’s been a new patch. And an expansion. I don’t think I like it ….. there are a few too many bugs in there for my liking, bugs that should have been squished during the development. Most of the ones I’ve spotted are cosmetic in nature but I was seeing my economy fluctuate for reasons I couldn’t pin down to events in game.

I’ll give Stellaris a rest for a bit and come back to it after a patch or two. There are loads of other games out there to play. And books that apparently I forgot that I had bought …. Oops. Need to read those.

Yesterday was a few races on Motorsport Manager. It’s a hands off game and I quite enjoy overseeing the races. It’s a game that punishes errors but can give you big rewards for figuring out a good strategy. One of my core strategies is to reduce the number of pit stops my team needs and the last race of yesterday saw my team get its first win in the top tier. I think we won by 8 seconds … having taken 2 pit stops fewer than 2nd place. A pit stop takes about 60-80 seconds in that top tier ….

We’ve been kicking butt at work too, clearing the throughput we have and getting things sorted so that other people can do their parts of getting things done. I can’t talk too much about that though but we’ve definitely been getting things done.

I’m not getting much joy though, just a feeling of job done, what’s next ?

That might be a snowpocalypse later in the week … Another blast of cold air is coming from the North East. Where I live might be shielded by the rest of the country but I hope people don’t get caught in it if it’s as bad as is being suggested.

Who knows, there might be another chance to make a :

🙂

But yeah. Pictures of something awesome are coming;
I’ll hopefully perk up around Wednesday evening time;
And hang in there, wherever you are.

If you’re struggling, talk to people. Even if it’s not about what you’re struggling about. Talking to good people is always an excellent way to lift your mood. Try to bring out a chuckle from people, it’ll bring out an answering smile in you too.

I think that’s another part of my personality, a kind of watch dog that keeps me pointed towards seeing opportunities for fun stuff.

I knew another watch dog :

That’s the beloved old man Scruff, seeking belly and throat rubs. Definitely a dedicated watch dog. The religious people who knocked on the door a long time ago were greeted by my mum and a Scruff who wasn’t barking, he was rumbling. All the time with a helicopter wagging tail out of sight of said religious people. Would have ruined the image.

Better close now. The trip home for Thursday went well, I got to see family we hadn’t seen in years and people from the cricket world from decades ago.

7 down, 45 to go !

I suspect I’m not going to hit that target of 52 books in the year. But I’ll enjoy trying to get there.

Picture first !

Yep.
I’m at it again.

I have no shame when it comes to borrowing memes. Book ?

Book 4 of the Expanse series is Cibola Burn. Humanity is expanding and this book is about the interaction of 3 parties. A group of original colonists who are actually squatters, the second wave who got permission to inhabit the planet and our hardy crew again. (I’m trying to avoid the spoilers for the other books !)

What can I say ? Another enjoyable book in the series. It didn’t outstay its welcome for me like Abaddon’s Gate did. I felt it was allowed to tell its story in just about the right amount of time. I’m looking forward to the next one now but I have a case of WHAT NEXT before then. It may well be an Alastair Reynolds novel and I have Revelation Space on the Kindle app. I also need to finish the How To Destroy The Universe book.

The onrunning theme in the Expanse books is that they adhere to the rules they’ve set up. That means no cheating with things like warp drive … Time spans like a couple of months to cross a solar system, things like that, limits of human physiology instead of cheating by having inertial dampeners to allow higher acceleration. The science fiction is not so much fiction as future science fact. I can see the universe of The Expanse (the human derived side of it at least) becoming science fact in the time scale of the books. The only techs we don’t have yet are : cheap spacesuits, accessible fusion power, the massively efficient Epstein thruster and the power armour.

I’m wondering what book 5, Nemesis Games, holds in store.

About that other space empiring thing …

A game I massively enjoy and am utterly addicted to at the moment is Stellaris. It has a one more turn/month/year factor about it that keeps me glued when I should be doing other things, like going to bed. It’s a very pretty, well realised space strategy game and it’ll hold my attention for a while yet I’m sure. Here’s how my last game finished :

My people are the Elaaminid Prime hive mind race in the SW. We own maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the galaxy. There is an independent federation in the light blue and a race of Fanatic Purifiers (they’re out to murder everyone else) in the dark blue. My hive has become a signatory to the other green empire in the NE.

That’s a cunning plan actually … I wanted to go as far in this game as the end game crisis, where invaders from within, from another galaxy or from another dimension come to try and murder everyone. The end game crises are tough, so I stopped in my conquering in order to keep some allies around …

The end game crisis didn’t occur though, so that’s how the game ends. A very satisfying game which was closely balanced between the 3 power blocs … until I was able to outmaneuver the enemy and start taking chunks of their territory. Patch is coming Thursday though, which I suspect will make this save game unplayable.

I’d want to launch into the new patch mechanics anyway.

But not this Thursday. Gonna be busy / otherwise occupied.

See you at the weekend or next week !

Car service today.

It’s been a little delayed (but not much) because of what was going on with my dad but there was a good opportunity to slot in the car service and a little extra today. I hadn’t been wanting to arrange it before because there was a good chance of having to break an appointment made before being certain where I’d be.

The car gets serviced where I bought it, up in Cheltenham. Which gives the opportunity to indulge in a little going back home …. the long way. I’ve actually driven on those roads before, albeit not all the way to Cardiff. I did a little series of comments on the Facebook :

On the one hand, I have a headache and the pressure in my eyes that must be like what a minor migraine is like.

On the other hand, currently in Cheltenham and still intend to make a side trip to Cardiff on the way back.

Sore head but …. There is a Lego shop there ….

Yeah. I had the sore head this morning. I have a bit of a caffeine dependency and it sometimes manifests like the above if I have too much blood in my caffeine stream. Or the sore head could have been due to my glasses being mucky. Either way, a caffeine dependency (any chemical dependency!) is bad and I tackle it at work via having fake (decaff) coffee. The headache is pretty much gone now, so it may have been also partly anxiety headache. I don’t like car servicing. I did get a good few chapters of Cibola Burn while waiting though.

The trip to Cardiff was fun for while I was in the countryside roads. There was some great scenery whizzing by. The roads seemed to be molded into the terrain, instead of cutting through the terrain like the modern straight roads do it. Gentle curves keeping things on the flat, things like that. Definitely some pretty countryside and green hills to look at while “OMG WHAT IS THAT DRIVER IN FRONT DOING !” No crashes were had today from not paying attention.

It would be good to visit Wales some more and indulge in that countryside air.

Or more Cardiff and a city I quite enjoyed wandering through today. Until the time came for the homing instinct to take me back to the car park. Homing instinct was broken. It took a while.

Lunch was very good. It would be a waste to go to the chain coffee places when going somewhere new but I found :

Tasty munchies.

I also found a place selling very cheap cds too. Only 6 escaped, although I daftly bought one duplicate. Oops. It was a very cheap cd place so I’ve only lost £2 there. What did I get ?
Maroon 5 – 1.22.03 Acoustic EP
The White Stripes – De Stijl
T’Pau – The Promise – I had no idea they’d made a third album.
Enya – A Day Without Rain
Belinda Carlisle – The Collection.

I’ll enjoy listening to those. But …. Cardiff. Lots of shops. What’s the main event ?

Yep. A den of miniature piranha masquerading as ankle biting knee high to grasshopper creatures that will knock you down, trample you and steal your money so they can buy little plastic bricks. (No children were harmed by me today – honest!)

Lego store was packed. It was mayhem ! They had good stuff on display too.

That’s the Mega Falcon. Just under 7,500 pieces and it’s a monster. The picture belies the size, until you look at the detail and see the mini figures adding scale and the small boxes up above. Even if I acquired that kit and built it, I have no idea where I’d find the space to put it. IT’S MASSIVE !

Lots more there too, including all the kits you’d see in normal shops, more of the rarer kits too like the Saturn V rocket and ….

Ship in Bottle ! That picture may or may not be from my car boot again.

A productive trip today, although I may pay for it tomorrow with a need to hibernate. We shall see.

Closing words ? There are no closing words today. Just :

Beep beep. Boop. Beep.