Author: Sleepypete

Back from a little hiatus

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September 20, 2022

9:22 pm

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Hi everyone,

18 days again since last post … I thought I should have a little hiatus while the whole UK in mourning thing was going on. It partly didn’t feel right, partly because I wanted to keep the profile lower. Back again now though.

Picture. We're looking at a very sad looking pocket dragon wearing an apron and yellow gloves holding a washing brush.
Good god the dust

Things have been continuing on here. Stuff’s been happening like more gaming (of course!), perhaps a little dose of ginger poisoning (gotta watch for that ginger) and a lot of reading. Let’s see if I left a clue in the last post …

I finished Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I have to admit, I didn’t get on with his Children of Time, partly because I found the switching between viewpoints quite jarring. Dogs of War swaps between viewpoints as well but instead of them being different stories that intertwined later, they’re a lot more tied in with each other in Dogs of War. Interesting book. Loved Rex, he’s a very Good Boy.

What’s it about ? In the near future, we’ve moved past robots as our agents of war, because they had a tendency to go nuts and run amok out of control. So they moved back to organics, first building dog soldiers for their loyalty and ferocity. They then move into the combat multiforms in the book, with Rex and his squad tearing their way through what Master points them at. An interesting book, considering morality and ethics as well as what’s going on in the head of our faithful big as a house and armed with cannons war dog. After being discouraged by Children of Time, I’ll be back for more from Adrian Tchaikovsky after Dogs of War.

Picture. We're looking at a tiny kitten sitting in a square of copper plumbing pipes. There is a valve on one end. The captions are "Steampunk Bazooka Goes Pew Pew Pew Pew"
No Felix No !

Due to a bit of an addiction to Airport CEO, I lost my 90 day Kindle reading streak … alas. (Game was worth it). So I went back into finishing off Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, this one had taken a while because my copy is a paperback and therefore doesn’t contribute to that reading streak … It’s a Warhammer 40k book set on the forgeworld of Armageddon, centred around the spire hive city of Helsreach. It’s a forbidding place, corrupted and spoiled by this being a major industrial centre. And that’s before the Orks turn up in vast numbers to destroy everything. It’s an ok book as 40k books go. Dan Abnett’s books are better but this one does a pretty decent job of showing the differences between normal humans, enhanced Space Marines, has cameos from the people in Titans and then the rest of the Imperial Guard. Worth a read … but these books tend to depend on the hubris of the setting. You’d have to be a 40k fan to enjoy this one but if you are, it’s one of the better ones.

The next book was a rare abandon from me. It was Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear and a speculative buy from either Bookbarn or Troutmark in Cardiff. I was struggling up to page 50 or so. The writing was awkward and confused and the setting just wasn’t making sense at all. Perhaps that was the intention, with this being set on a generation colony ship on a mission that had gone desperately wrong. But it didn’t draw in my attention at all and I was ready to abandon based on what I was seeing about it on Goodreads. (So that adds Greg Bear to the list that has David Brin on it as authors with a great reputation where I just don’t get on with their books).

Next up was Derelict: Halcyone Space book 1 by LJ Cohen. I really enjoyed this one. It’s a Young Adult scifi book and you have to prepare yourself for what that means but if you can get past that, it was a great tale. What do I mean by that ? Young Adult tends to be about precocious but utterly brilliant 15 to 20 year olds being the centre of the story. Their brilliance will see them do unfeasible things with what they have available, the precocious nature means lots of bickering. The adults will be dull, boring and occasionally murderously evil.

What that does open up is the possibility for character interactions and they tend to get to what they’re doing fast. Yep, enjoyed Derelict enough that I’ve bought the remaining 4 books in the series. What’s this one about ? It’s set on a backwater asteroid base which has a ship connected which crashed there 40 years before the story. Conspiracy stuff erupts … around the kids who are using it, one to grow drugs, one as a science project to reactivate the ship, one to hide in and another who wants to help the young lady reactivate the ship. Bit of a crush maybe that the young lady wants nothing to do with.

After an accident which sees them zooming off into space, with varying degrees of injury, they’re in need of rescue and help with the asteroid base (and a warship) looking for them in the void. I’m curious to see where this series goes. The first book rattled along nicely.

Next up is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, I’ve just read the opening blurb on that so far. And it’s starting me wondering if I need to upgrade my ageing iPad Mini 2 because the ebook was making it crash. (Dogs of War was misbehaving too – very odd).

Picture. We're looking at the edge of a laptop on the left and a puppy to the right. The puppy has his mouth wide open, with as big a bite as he can muster on the laptop. The caption is "When your laptop is running low on space" "But your pupper helps by giving it a megabite"
Time to download more treats !

I’ve been looking at the tech again … Today it was the iPads. There’s apparently a 10th gen iPad coming this week which would be a substantial update. I’m not sure what I’d go for between the iPad and the iPad Mini. I’ve been ok with my little mini for I forget how many years I’ve owned it for. But a full size iPad would work well for the reading. I haven’t gamed on my iPad Mini for a long time now. Gaming’s better on the desktop.

I’ve also been increasingly having thoughts about changing the laptop. It’s still very capable of doing what I ask it to do but there are a couple of things that would trigger a change. 1 – it’s chonky. If I’m doing more away trips then I’d like something lighter to take with me especially as work trips mean I’m taking two laptops. 2 – it isn’t Windows 11 compatible … but this is something that will only become important when Windows 10 stops getting updates in a few years time. Oh and the third is that part of me that wants new toys.

It might well be a return to Acer, these have always been solid and reliable if not as shiny as laptops from Asus, Dell and HP. But … that impression might have come from what’s on show at the shops … and they don’t tend have the higher end Acers that are available direct from the company.

Picture. A dragon with an orange mask is sitting in a blue and silver rocket ship, ready and waiting to take him away in a whoosh.
Set thrusters to whoosh

I may have gotten addicted to another game … It’s called Airport CEO and it’s about building an airport of increasing size. I may have put 39 hours into this one already since acquiring it via a Humble bundle bundle. It’s got a lot of the foundations right and the gameplay of setting up the airport right has properly drawn me in. One issue it has is that the tutorials are confusing and don’t adequately cover what you need to do to make the game’s systems work properly. Little things can stop the airport working and it’s not obvious what you did, how to fix it or how to get it right in the first place and you find yourself resorting to wikis and videos to see how it should be set up. But I think I have it mostly sorted now.

Next step for my airport is to go international with the big aircraft.

But not tonight because it’s getting late, I want to read more book and I know that if I open Airport CEO again, it’ll capture my attention for hours again. It’s a game without the natural break points of the race weekends of Motorsport Manager (restarted, still great) and F1 Manager 22 (still playing but it desperately needs patching to salvage it).

Yep, still playing F1 Manager 22 although that’s kinda on hiatus as well until the next patch arrives.

I think that’s it for me … I did mention ginger poisoning. Ginger proper messes me up. I can still function but it explains a certain amount of brain fog and cuts where my skin thins up (and other bleeding). I think it was from a certain company’s ice cream. I might have accidentally picked the flavours with ginger in … or they have a contamination problem. Either way, no ice cream for a while, I’ll try again with a different ice cream maker at some point when I’m confident the ginger is out of my system.

I did enjoy the ice cream though in a “stuff bad for you tastes great” way.

Later everyone ! Be well.

A Game of Sadness

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September 2, 2022

9:01 pm

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Cor, that’s a downer of a title isn’t it ?

I bought the F1 Manager 22 game in the end. Green Man Gaming were doing a tempting enough discount and while Motorsport Manager is a hell of a game, I’m at that point in the current campaign where I really need to either start it again or look at something rather different. And F1M22 came along at a very convenient time.

Meme picture. We're looking at a row of 7 boxes, numbered 1 to 7. Each has a cat sitting inside looking rather comfortable in their boxes. The caption is "The reason why humans don't race cats."
Number 5 looks keen

I’m going to talk about books in a bit but I think I need to get the moan out of my system first. If you get bored of the sad rant, skip to the picture with the coffee mug. Ok, here goes ! The sad thing about the F1M22 game is that while it looks really good and has excellent presentation, the underlying game just isn’t very good. So far at least. I’ve only done 4 races so the strategic layer hasn’t had a chance to show what it does yet. It’s inevitable that you compare games in a genre and this time it’s the 2016 Motorsport Manager to the 2022 game.

I thought, watching pre-release streams, that it looked like the developer Frontier had been hiring people who worked on Motorsport Manager. MM turned back to the mobile games domain but haven’t released much recently. So it made sense that MM’s output had declined because their people had joined Frontier’s project. And they do seem to share some characteristics outside of just the racing, like AI that doesn’t really understand transition between wet and dry conditions.

Why is the new one the Game of Sadness ?

Because it wastes its opportunity with the licence and so far, it’s completely missed its mark on being a better game than Motorsport Manager. It has a whole heap of flaws with its race weekend engine and they make you think that you should just be skipping the practice and qualifying and just rattling through the calendar between races. That’s not what games like this should be about, they’re racing management games. Let’s see :

Minimal difference between tyres and a very obnoxious mechanism that bans you from reusing tyres previously used in the race weekend. This is kinda in F1 already but it’s badly explained in the game and implemented very poorly. It’s confusing.

Drivers need about 18 laps to tell you whether or not they like the set up and that’ll reset on the slightest change. In real life, they’ll give an impression on the set up during an installation lap where they’ll come back to the garage after just a lap. This is over 3x 1 hour sessions so there is time to get the set up sorted out. That’s in contrast to MM which has a much more gameplay friendly system to set up the car, including the adjustments you can make. It’s like the F1M22 people took MM as a template but didn’t understand how it contributed to good gameplay.

Yep. There are shortcuts and simplifications in MM which make it a hell of a lot better game, I’ll rattle through a couple of F1 style races in MM in a shorter session than a single race weekend in F1M22 will take up. That’s a big reason why I’ve only done 4 races so far in F1M22.

Apparently the tyre balancing is to mask a broken driver AI, haven’t tried that myself so I’m going on forum words. But it isn’t reflective of F1 and this should have been sorted out in play testing.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been playtested prior to release. One reason I got very excited about Surviving Mars was because there were weekly hour long streams with the community manager playing alongside one of the producers of the game. They were playing on live code which was seeing weekly updates on the run up to release and it was looking like a fun experience with excellent gameplay backing it up. (And then I bounced off it at launch mostly due to getting annoyed with the modding system).

I’ll probably keep plugging away with F1M22, alongside Motorsport Manager. But if you’re interested in the genre, avoid F1M22 at the moment. There might be a good game to be salvaged from the admittedly very pretty bones but Motorsport Manager is infinitely more than twice the game at less than half the price.

What else ? Cars will crash, hit the barriers, cause a safety car … and keep on rolling. IRL F1 cars are a bit fragile. If there’s a hit hard enough to trigger the safety procedures then the car will almost certainly be a retirement. Not in the game … And there are other issues like DRS trains that are a bit too strong. The terrible practice and set up mechanics are about the worst of it though. I was actually enjoying the races through the issues.

Meme picture. We're looking at a fairly monochrome picture of a simple coffee mug on what I think is a mat. The caption is "When you're having a problem, remember that technically, coffee IS a solution." Attribution "Sweatpants and Coffee"
Need more milk !

Outside of games, I’ve been enjoying rattling through the books. I finished John Scalzi’s The End Of All Things and moved on rapidly through On A Red Station, Drifting. The latest is Dogs of War. About the books ?

The End of All Things is the last book in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. It wraps up a sequence where Earth has gone to the stars … and found a lot of competition for room out there with a lot of hostile races who want to kill us or eat us or often, both. Oh and humanity being humanity, the Colonial Union that runs Humans In Space is not a particularly pleasant organisation both to its people and everyone else in the galaxy. It’s a great series from an author I enjoy reading a lot. I can’t say much about the final book due to spoilers but I’d definitely recommend picking up and having a read of the first book, Old Man’s War. It’s a tale of a 75 year old gent who leaves the Earth to become a Colonial Union soldier, with a very special new green body. Yep. Green. It makes sense.

Next up was On A Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard. She’s been promoting the cover for her upcoming book involving Lesbian Space Pirates which I’ll almost certainly pick up after it comes out in November. On A Red Station, Drifting is set on a future space station run by a Vietnamese family which is part of a future Empire. It’s an interesting set up, with an Honoured Ancestor being the overseeing Mind for the station and a newly arrived refugee adding extra chaos into the situation. It’s a very interesting peek into the world of a different but still familiar culture. I enjoyed following its story and seeing where it was going to go. Another one I’d recommend and I’ll definitely be checking out more from the author.

Oh and she laughed and said the reading dwagon was cute when I sent it over after seeing “Tea Space Dragons” on her Twitter header. (Here’s a Twitter link).

Next up is Dogs of War, seeing me go back to Adrian Tchaikovsky for the first time since Children of Time. Not sure now why I didn’t get on with Children of TIme, it was probably the skipping between spider perspective and human perspective. Dogs of War has had an interesting start, with the intro being very Dog Brain focused and the next couple of chapters being from the perspective of the humans.

More about Dogs of War when I’ve finished it.

Hope you all have a great weekend, be well 🙂

To zoom or not to zoom ?

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August 29, 2022

9:32 pm

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Hello everyone,

A fortnight has gone by again ! It’s been eventful. Kinda. Perhaps not quite as eventful as some weeks but let’s see … 2 parts to this post again today, update first then a bit of game related musing later …

Meme picture. We're looking at two cats, a grey one and an orange one, apparently frozen in mid air, jumping from right to left. The caption is "Hover Cat to Base ... Requesting Purrmission to land."
Safe landings kitties

So … stuff happened – One of the things on my lengthening list of stuff I need to sort out has been to replace my computer chair. My hand kinda got forced there. I’d been managing it being down to 4 legs instead of 5 for a while but hadn’t taken the hint that I should be kinda urgently replacing it before another leg disappeared and I couldn’t manage the balance. (It was also partly down to unfamiliarity with what the local tip takes – gotta clear space before getting new stuff at the moment).

So after a second leg broke at about 11.30 pm on a Monday night, I had a moderately uncomfortable half day working from my sofa followed by quickly acquiring another chair. I bought an ADX Firebird 21 from the local computer place. It’s ok but I now know a little bit more about what to get in a comfortable chair. The good is that it’s comfortable to sit in with a normal posture and the cushions are firm but comfortable. That’s in contrast to the Razer chair which felt like an unpadded bench. It’s also got arms that go up and down, which I need to support my arms. What it also has though, which causes awkwardness, is bucket seat style high side bolsters which aren’t good if you like to fold your legs on the chair.

I’ll adjust to that :-D. I nearly bought the Corsair chair (thinking that they didn’t have the ADX one) but they didn’t have one in stock. This is where not having it end up being an urgent buy would have been handy …

Oh – there was more drama involved … When the last leg broke, I got pitched sideways into a set of shelves which have my printer on top. My printer landed on my head … softly because it was being suspended by its power cable. Still a bit of a struggle though trying to remove it in a compromised position with arms in angles that don’t support having any leverage to move stuff.

I think I also have a compromised thyroid, which I need to talk to a doctor about. The symptoms lining up include extreme tiredness, no control over internal temperature (building the new chair was a sweat drenched trial!) and there’s a few more which could explain why I have on / off struggles with swallowing food. (I’m ok, I just need to actually see a doctor for a change).

Meme picture. We're looking at a dog, sitting up with paws on a table. The dog is wearing a blue shirt with a stethoscope. The caption is "The good news is I was able to reset his broken leg." "The bad news is I buried it somewhere in the back yard."
Oh no Rover !

The other news is that I’ve been out of the country again … Can’t say anything about where because it was work related. But it was a good successful trip with good people meeting lovely people. Bit short though, in the notice given and the days away. Like, we found out on the Thursday before traveling out on the Wednesday. That’s not many working days to sort it out but our travel system and people are pretty good. Travel is easier if you set everything up before hand so you don’t need to wing it so much while you’re on the way. That was one thing that annoyed me two years ago because there were important variables with that which the people on the other end should have been sorting out. Pandemic and quarantine related things. (I didn’t do that trip two years ago for a bunch of reasons)

Yep ! Good trip, good place, would totally go there again, can’t say anything about it.

I hope there isn’t a repeat of the travel back though. Getting to UK was fine, they’re very efficient over where we went. However, taking 5.5 hours (including about an hour for lunch stop) to get from London to Bristol is not fun. There was an accident on the M25 motorway around London so everyone’s satnavs was diverting them into clogged up roads.

Meme picture. We're looking at an orange and white cat who is looking at us with intense eyes. He has his paws up as if gripping an invisible steering wheel. The caption is "Invisible race car"
Zoom zoom

I have a gaming quandary at the moment … There’s a new motor racing manager game out. After a long sequence of jumping from game to game in this genre, when Motorsport Manager came out it was a game I stuck to. I have 2035 hours in Motorsport Manager now and still enjoying it. However, I am getting to the end of a fourth phase in a campaign that’s been going for I think 46 in game years now. (Each phase is winning the top championship with a team built up from being last). So the arrival of a new game in the genre is being something of a big temptation right now.

Let’s see – it’s F1 Manager 22 and the early impressions from watching people’s gameplay streams and from browsing the forums is that it may well be a Motorsport Manager 2 by another name. A lot of the bugs and issues are familiar from Motorsport Manager. What I think may have happened is that in the genesis of the development, Frontier (the publishers) went on a hiring spree bringing in devs who previously worked on Motorsport Manager.

I don’t have any issues with this. They had a proven track record with MM and it’s given them well earned employment working on a game that they were being denied working on at Playsport, who brought us Motorsport Manager. And it looks like they’ve brought us a very promising, superbly presented game in F1 Manager 22.

So why don’t I own it yet ?

There’s a bunch of reasons. The big one is that it’s shackled to the F1 licence, which limits it in a bunch of ways. It’s limited to the 10 teams with their 20 cars that are in current F1. There apparently isn’t a Create Your Own Team option and the thoughts of F2 and F3 to climb through haven’t made their way into the game. One thing I like about Motorsport Manager is starting with a rubbish team anchored to the back of the grid and building them up into being winners. In a strategy game like this, your input has to matter. Hopefully it’s possible to get Williams to the front in this game.

Oh and it also has commentary in there from a person I can’t stand from the Sky team, so that would be getting turned off. Annoyance from hearing it live (and varied) would lead to NOPE if the commentary is drawn from an apparently very limited selection of massively repeated soundbites. Yeah, mute that rubbish. It’s part of the price though, which brings me to :

Motorsport Manager was I think £20 on release and had expansions come out later for GT and Endurance racing costing £6 each. That makes a 3 tier league for open wheel and 2 tier leagues for GT and Endurance each. F1 Manager 22 only has one tier and it’s costing £45 (currently has a 10% discount).

I’m very tempted by the game … but not at that price. I can keep playing Motorsport Manager for a while, soak up more opinion about F1M22, see if the people streaming it now are still playing it in a month and wait for a price point that I’m happy to dive in to. That’s the beauty about having lots of viable games around, we don’t have to obey that temptation to go for the new shiny just as it comes out.

I can very happily afford it. I just don’t want to early adopt at a higher price than I think it’s worth. It does make me think back to when Elite Dangerous came out. I was being very wary about the track record of the devs, due to how many bugs and issues were in Frontier Elite 2 (way back in the 90s!). Reports from the beta of the latest Elite were very promising, so I dived in to buy it on release. A key difference there is that it hit a gap in the market, offering a very playable space game hitting a gap in the market. (The X games have been there, I just immediately bounce off them for some reason).

There isn’t a gap in the market this time, Motorsport Manager is old now with a release in Nov 2016 and the last update being in Nov 2017. But it’s one of those rare ones that delivered what it did superbly and it still works incredibly well as a game now. It would be nice to have new features and new tracks but it still stands up very well now.

Not so sure about the new one, although I see its acquisition as an inevitability come sales time.

For now though … back to stream watching and continuing a reading streak that’s nearing 90 days now with John Scalzi’s The End Of All Things. I wonder if there was a book after this one …

Stay safe, be well !

(Addon – Green Man Gaming had the F1 Manager 22 game on a 35% discount, so I own it now. Not played it yet 😀 )

Thinking about the games I want

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August 15, 2022

10:52 pm

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Hello everyone,

I mention playing the games a lot. Probably too much :-). But there are a couple in my head that are games I think I’d really like to play, if they existed.

Picture. Meme. A grey and black striped cat is sitting at a laptop keyboard, with paw on the mouse. The caption is "...and I have extensive experience writing computer code, including but not limited to OIC, BTW, BRB, IMHO, LMAO, ROFL, TTYL
TLDR 2 many TLAs

I’ll start by going way back … and this goes all the way back to the sci fi sensational mini series (well, it was back then – it was heavily sold by ITV) V. This saw Visitor aliens come to Earth with a promise of uplifting our technology in return for specially synthesized chemicals to ward off environmental collapse at their home planet.

Of course, they had a more sinister motive and it’s up to our heroes (the core characters) to lead a rebellion to get the Visitors to leave. There was a recent remake series which was pretty good … but was cancelled before it got a chance to tell its tale all the way through.

Anyway – the game back then would have been about flying a shuttle up to the mothership and then getting off and fighting through it to take control. A bit ambitious on the home computers of the day, with those being the BBC Micro, Spectrum and Commodore 64, with V coming out in 1983. It’d be a rare game that would combine all those now, although they’re getting more common with released games like No Mans Sky and Elite Odyssey, with Star Citizen offering that in the future. Games like Space Engineers and Empyrion probably come close too but they’re limited by being crafting games and those tend to hit a point where they grind into unplayability.

Starfield, a coming soon from Bethesda, might offer some of this gameplay. It’s a future scifi with spaceships from the same stable as gave us Skyrim for poking things with swords and the post apocalyptic Fallout 4. From what we’ve seen, I think it’ll have a well developed run around and shoot game but it may be more limited on the flying. But we shall see there.

Picture. We're looking at a very curvy little red sports car, with a couple of headlights popping out from the wings. It's an older car, with a hard top covering the bit where the driver goes.
Racy in red

I play a huge amount of Motorsport Manager. They did an incredible job with this one when it came out in November 2016. I am currently at 2016 (coincidence) hours in it and that’ll easily crack 3000 probably. Why so many ? They got the gameplay level just about right, with a nicely developed way of improving the cars. The racing is good. It’s nicely varied with the F1 style, GT cars and the endurance racing. It keeps some of the unwanted complexity away from the player. It Is Very Easy To Play. In fact, that last is why I have 2000+ hours in the game. I can have it running while having my dinner or when my hands or arms just don’t want to support more active types of gameplay.

But whereas Motorsport Manager is all about racing around different tracks, my idea turns that round. Instead of running a racing team, how about running one of the tracks ?

You take the park crafting ideas of games like Jurassic Park or Coaster games and make a race track instead. Maybe have multiple variations of track available. Make sure the track keeps busy. Upgrade it so your track can run bigger events.

I dunno, could be a nice variation and I don’t think it’s been done before. There’s been track editing in games (I’ve never played) like Trackmania and there’s a new one called Race League (which doesn’t look too good from the reviews) but I haven’t seen one that’s about managing a track.

4 Pictures. Each picture has the viewer looking out of a pile of snow towards the happy face of dogs who have dug through the snow to find them.
Good Doggos

My third one (which is about as much as my Brain can think of today with the end of the heat!) is a rescue game. There are a few of these out there. Like Rescue HQ which has you setting up a Ambulance, Fire and/or Police HQ. Or Stormworks where you build rescue vehicles and go out on missions with them. Rescue HQ looks curious actually, I might look more seriously at it when it’s on sale again.

What I’m thinking of goes back to Thunderbirds. What about a game that lets you run International Rescue ? That’d be pretty cool. To be a typical game in this genre, you’d have to start small and build up to the suite of specialist vehicles that we saw in Thunderbirds. But I think it’s something I’d like to have a look at.

Stormworks sounds like it could eventually be on that scale. It’s a game where you design and build your own rescue vehicles, starting from small limited purpose boats. But it also looks very fiddly and doesn’t really pass the “I’d enjoy that” test. I’ll have a look at Rescue HQ when it’s on sale again but I’m thinking more about the rescue end of it, not the police side of it. You know, the varied and interesting disaster scenarios that were a core of Thunderbirds.

Meme Picture. We're looking at 3 Star Wars Stormtroopers in their white helmeted armour sitting at a table drinking blue milk. The caption is "It was an insurance scam. I mean, come on, the guy who blew it up was the dude's son. Like, I know they say they're estranged but they were clearly in on it together for the insurance money. There were delays during construction and Vader knew it had design flaws - it was never going to make back its investment so they staged a rebel raid. And Vader was the only one to survive. It's so obvious.
Hmm …

It is suspicious when you think about it. Our rescue inc would have to do better :-D.

How about other games that are definitely on the way ? What am I looking forward to ? I mentioned Starfield already but there’s a couple more in particular on the list :

Cosmoteer – this is an indie game that’s all about building starships and throwing them into battle with other starships. I’ve played the demo of it from a few years ago and it is very promising indeed. It has a combination of simplicity with variation. The simplicity makes it easy to understand, the variation between shield and weapon types opens up the strategy element of figuring out what the best approach will be for your starship brawler.

Airport games – I’m curious about these. They’re like the race track thing in that you build up your facility and upgrade it to handle better flights. But the ones out at the moment Airport CEO, Sim Airport, Sky Haven all have flaws which keep me away from them.

Deadstick – this one looks sadly dead and it’s a shame. It was a flight simulator built around small bush planes. You’d take small parcels and bigger passengers around an Outback style map, doing deliveries. I think I’d have absolutely loved this game. (And should really try out the similar but sci fi Frontier Pilot Simulator again)

Nebulous Fleet Command – is a space tactical combat game. There’s a few of these coming soon.

Jagged Alliance 3 – I loved playing Jagged Alliance 2. It was a real time / turn based tactical battle game with a great strategic layer on top. The mission was to recapture a 3rd world country that had been taken over in a coup by an insane Evil Queen. Fantastic game and the more recent game didn’t cut it. Hopefully the just announced JA3 is a good one.

Last one – Starship Simulator – this one has you as a crew member (of any rank) on board a starship that’s going to feel very similar to the model set up by Star Trek. It looks absolutely stunning, with a fully modelled starship to wander around in. Hopefully they pull off a good game with it too.

That’s it for today I think – really struggled in the last heatwave but hopefully we’re through that now. It wasn’t a dry heat like in July, it was a muggy hammer of conditions with the atmosphere feeling twice as dense as it should do. We haven’t had a proper thunderstorm here today but there’s still chance later in the week.

Hope things are tolerable where you are !

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Reading, Gaming, Thinking Diverse

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August 9, 2022

12:12 am

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Hello everyone,

Had a quiet week off last week, which was pretty much the plan. I did think I’d find my way over to Cardiff or otherwise out of the house. I’m a little disappointed in myself that didn’t happen, although when I think about going to places like Cardiff, I’ll go to regular haunts, see what I didn’t buy before and … don’t buy it again. It would have been good to get out and about though.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a sad grey cat with blue eyes looking over the top of a sofa to left of picture. The caption is "I spent all day sleeping ... Now I'm tired."
Why does this always happen ?

So what did I get up to outside of hiding indoors all the time ? Lots of gaming. Lots of reading. Lots of music listening. Thinking about the next laptop, although the trojan scare I talked about last post is resolved. The warning popups haven’t been back. Phew ! So the laptop will hang in there for another little while. It’s let me catch up a bit on the new music, which includes acquisitions from a recent steam sale in the Skyrim, Rimworld and Fermi Paradox soundtracks.

Still not played Rimworld.

I did have a look at this one though :

Game screenshot. Frostpunk. We're looking at a dark scene where snow covers a barren land except for a circle in the centre which is bare and thawed. In the centre, there is a tall cylinder structure with a fire coming out of the top. There are tents clustered in a circle at its base. The words are "Our city. Day 1. Population 80."
Chilly out

That’s Frostpunk, which is a survival base builder strategy game. A new ice age has hit the Earth and your ragged band of survivors are huddled around a steam generator that is the only thing between them and a frostbitten demise. It’s a hell of a game, superbly balanced (I’ve watched a few playthroughs of the scenarios) and really, really hard. I got my city up to about 300 people and almost the end of the Londoners storyline before abandoning that run. I couldn’t get them harvesting coal fast enough to keep the generator running and could see the inevitable death spiral coming.

I’ll probably be back in this one. Other first looks for me include Fermi Paradox, which is a very simplified thing where you have a cluster of star systems that independently evolve intelligent life. Will they survive ? Will they thrive ? Will they embark on conquests of the stars ? A curious game, maybe not ready for a recommendation though.

I also completed the last achievements on Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, so I’ve been looking at CMC 2018. It’s ok, the newer game is better in pretty much every way and it has mouse acceleration which can’t be turned off. Never put mouse acceleration in your games people … I’ve also been looking at Rover Mechanic Simulator, which is the same thing with a limited number of rovers that you rebuild from your pod on Mars.

There’s something about the mechanic games … and other simulator type games have carved out their own little niche too. With the car one, it’s that feeling of progress as you tear down a car and rebuild it into something shiny.

Sacrificed some of the life in my neck to Rogue Tower – I could do with looking at my chair and replacing it with one that still allows it to raise. That’s an odd thing that … The posture I’m in at the moment is ok for eye height with my eyes being roughly level to the top half of the screen. That’s ideal … But when I’m in a game like Rogue Tower, I’ll lean forwards which lowers my head so I’m looking up and wrecking my neck. Oops.

Oh and there’s the truck games too. I’m enjoying these again now having recognised and gotten used to some of the irritations with the AI of the other vehicles.

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're in the cabin of a lorry, looking right towards our passenger. He's the yellow of a Pikachu (small cute animal with a lightning shaped tail).
Where to Pikachu ?

I’m doing that thing again … Where I thought I’d rattle through some stuff fast and not have that much to talk about :-D. Reading ?

Finished The Human Division by John Scalzi, it’s book 5 in the Old Man’s War series that I would happily recommend. It’s like an inspired by Starship Troopers book, where the lead character in the first 3 books finds himself leaving Earth as a 75 year old to be reborn into a super starship trooper body that’s then thrown at Humanity’s enemies. Of which there are many. Yet there’s more nuance here, as they’ll talk about what’s actually going on in the universe. And you steadily get a feeling of “Are we the baddies ?” I’m curious as to where it’ll go in the last book, with its foreboding title of The End Of All Things. But not yet, because I’m indulging the diverse reading thing by going into Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night.

I mentioned diversity … a comment in a conversation got me thinking about the people I follow and support through things like twitch subscriptions. I like to try and keep myself honest there with a little bit of internal watchdogging. I have a little concern about what I’ve spotted there …

First up is the subscriptions – I’ve moved these around a little bit. I’m down to 9 Twitch subscriptions now, they’re all actually women now. I was actively subscribing to a bloke but ended that because he wasn’t doing the interesting content any more. Similar with another lady streamer. And the other bloke streamer lost my sub due to behaviour in his community. They’re all white too, none are people of colour. Not sure what that says about me to be honest. There are a couple of threads there :

The streamer communities I’m involved with don’t raid into people of colour streams much at all, so the exposure to hook me in doesn’t happen. However, I will mention Nathan Whatiskiss who I know as a wonderful roleplayer (but I haven’t seen his gaming content) and TrooperSJP who is another wonderful roleplayer. I don’t follow Trooper because he misbehaves with how he self promotes his own streams (he breaches rules on discords that aren’t his).

I think that’s the main reason why my follows are missing the people of colour, because the rare times people raid into them, I’ll quickly skip into a stream done by someone I do actively follow. Maybe I should give the raided a bit of a chance more often. Perhaps it’s a problem more on Twitch’s end, where people of colour might not be getting the same exposure.

The male female split is slightly deceptive too, as I actively maintain Patreon subs to 1.5 men. (The 0.5 is shared between Tashnarr and TheWanderingInn for the 40k layers model painting show).

The question someone asked was actually more about LGBTQIA+. The split on there for my subs is 3 straight, 1 bi, 1 pan, 2 lesbian and 2 where I have no idea. And that last ? is something I’m very ok with because we should only know where people are on those categories if they want to tell us, it’s not something that really should matter. Oh and there’s a trans person in that list too. And a person who would quite happily be first in the queue for the Probing when the aliens land.

Personally, where people place themselves on the LGBTQIA+ doesn’t really matter to me. I’ll go back to the series Another Life there (scifi series, in space, very tense and atmospheric, dramatic) where the character I was most interested in was Zayn who is played by the non-binary JayR Tinaco (imdb link). The character was interesting from an intelligence and challenging dialogue point of view. They also came over as knowing what they were doing, which was key in this particular series.

That’s the thing about diversity – our differences make us strong. And interesting. They give different perspectives on how to live, laugh and love. And what people get up to in the bedroom and with whom really isn’t any of our concern. If people love each other, they should have the chance to explore that without prejudice.

What really matters is (easy geek points on offer here) being excellent to each other, in all ways.

Picture. Meme. A sad looking cat with big eyes is laying down looking at us. The caption is "It hurts when someone you love says mean things like..." "It's time to wake up"
One more minute ?

It was definitely a bit of a wrench this morning switching from the time off timescales to a work from home timescale where I’m actively working from 7.50am.

I think I’ll leave this one there. I’m a little concerned as to whether a bit of prejudice has crept in with the stream watching, although that’s mostly down to who I get raided into (A stream raid is where a person finishes and takes their audience over to another person to watch). I should give the raided a bit more of a chance, it’s how you find fun people to watch. That said though, of the channels that twitch is showing in the shortcut list at the moment, none of them look like people of colour. (Oh wait, there’s Caustic Phoenix coming in with the Pink Pixels show – there’s one !). There are none being promoted on Twitch’s front page at the moment. I’m not watching the lovely Caustic because I was watching Tashnarr already and Ashlinaa (new name !) on the laptop and the Pink Pixels show will run on too late.

Perhaps it’s twitch that has the problem.

Stay safe everyone, be well, be good to each other.

Relax, chill, maybe laptop, BOOK

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July 31, 2022

10:09 pm

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Hello everyone,

Feels like the planet has calmed down a bit since the last post, it no longer wants to roast us alive. Perhaps it wants to drown us instead … I’ve been enjoying watching the cricket while it’s been on. There’s been series of England vs India and both the ladies and the men have been playing in England vs South Africa games. And while the ladies dominated their games, it was a bit more balanced in the mens games.

I do like it when you’re watching something sporty and have no idea what the result is going to be, right up to near the end of the game. That’s a more interesting type of game to watch and follow. The cricket has definitely been like that lately, although it’s been a bit rain affected.

Picture. We can see a tiny dragon perched on a normal finger. The dragon looks very overheated. Caption "Please take great care out in the hills and mountains of Wales today. The heatwave is prematurely hatching the eggs of the Welsh dragon (Y Ddraig Goch). If you come across a baby dragon just leave it be. Do not take it home! Dragons do not make good pets, they very quickly get too hot to handle."
Take care of your dragons

It did get pretty toasty. The fan in my room was reading 32 degrees C at one point, it’s down to 26 C again now. When I put my graphics card in the machine in I think September last year, it was idling at 46 C. That reached 56 C at one point … (54 now but I have a twitch stream running which means it’s not quite idle).

Curiously though, it felt hotter when I was building Meltdown, my desktop PC. That might have been down to me being more physically active when putting that together. And one way I have of counteracting heat is by reducing physical activity, especially since the probable covid of Mar/Apr 2020 where the slightest bit of extra physical activity was making my own temperature go into meltdown. That’s been with me for quite a long while since as well. Maybe I’m just not great at regulating my temperature now.

Talking of technology … I thought for a bit today that I might have to retire my laptop. It’s 4 years old and still does what I want it to. It’s actually capable of more as it’s a gaming laptop. I haven’t actually played any games on it, which feels a bit wasteful. Ok, so reasons for retiring it :

Picture. We're looking at a stone statue scene. A woman is sitting on a throne, looking left towards a small lady holding up a tablet. It looks suspiciously like an open laptop computer.
What’s that ? The Amazons will deliver ?

Ok, it’s only from 2018, so it isn’t due to it being steam driven. It’s actually more than capable of handling what I want from it, which is pretty much just web browsing, stream watching and hosting the iTunes. It can also easily link into my camera (via the SD card reader) and my phone via Bluetooth. Although a replacement could be able to do that too.

So what’s wrong with it ? I’ll do what might be the clincher last.

It’s heavy, it’s big, the screen isn’t what I wanted because the visual quality isn’t great when you’re not looking straight at the screen. The sound is awful. On a gaming laptop too. It’s just too quiet. But then again, it’s competing against my desktop (which I think is cheating with volume levelling) and the hifi or telly.

But the clincher might be that a tenacious phishing trojan might have crept in. It was detected when I turned on the laptop yesterday, supposedly dealt with … and detected again today. I’ve done an offline Defender scan and another full machine scan but if it’s popping up again then I think I’ll have to retire the laptop. Sounds drastic that doesn’t it …

The laptop is also the machine I used for my online banking and the answer to the “how did it get in ?” may be a coincidence but the detections started on the reboot after I paid off the credit card this month …. and I don’t web browse on that laptop much now, I usually do that on the desktop. (Could have been American Truck Sim related).

It needs to be a safe laptop. We’ll see what happens when I fire it up tomorrow. One thing that will mean is copying the iTunes library over again. That’s reached 19,000 tracks now … I won’t copy it all over, there are a few game soundtracks on there which don’t really have much going for them, they’re a bit generic, boring and not special. There’s also some albums in there by people like one E.C. person who stole I Shot The Sheriff amongst other bits of music crime. He’s a racist piece of trash and I don’t think I want his greatest hits album in my library any more. So I’ll trim down some stuff like that … and other albums that are a bit boring.

So what would it be ?

Picture. We're looking at a computer with a simple keyboard. On top of it is a small cathode ray tube monitor and to the right is a disc drive with the multicolour Apple logo on it.
Bit beefier than my last Apple product

I’ve actually used one of those … A very good friend from when I lived in Northern Ireland had one. It was a good machine too, although that’s a long time ago. I won’t get an Apple laptop again, they have curious ideas about who gets to decide what people do with their machines. Me, I believe that I own the machine and the hardware and I should be able to do what I want to it. Apple believe otherwise, so they do things like disable the ability to use a 3rd party wifi USB stick, which I was using because the wifi in the laptop was having trouble. I’m also running iTunes 10.7 because it has the iTunes DJ feature which was removed in later versions of iTunes. I’ve spoken about that before – updating iTunes and losing that feature isn’t an option. And …

Ok. We’re ranting. But Tashnarr does that so much better. (Twitch clip link)

Probably use iTunes 10.7 still, which links to my iPhone 5, which can’t be upgraded past iOS 6 because then it won’t talk to iTunes, which means the iPhone 5 isn’t allowed to connect to the internet any more. Because Apple gotta Apple. I would be rather interested in knowing about music playing applications that have an iTunes DJ type facility. It’s an automatic playlist, where you can add songs and have them in a particular order and then the software will randomly pick more songs to add in if there are less than a certain amount in the queue. So I’ll queue up an album and some more songs and then shuffle in what the software suggests.

Before I move on from it, if I get a laptop it’ll come from PCSpecialist and I’ll go back to a thinner and lighter 14″ model with 16GB of memory and either a 1TB or 2TB SSD. Big SSDs are viable now, whereas they weren’t when I bought Cookie Monster (current laptop).

A poster picture. We're looking at a sleeping cat, curled in a ball with front paws gripping tail. The caption is "Relax it's what cats do best"
Cat gotta cat

I’m off work this week, I was getting the “take a break or be made to” messages from inside and this week was a good opportunity to get away. What’s the plan ? I need to get out the house a little bit, my health is going to need me being more active. And I need to counter an increasing reclusiveness tendency. We’ll see there. Cinema is likely, as is another wander around Cardiff.

As well as lots of music listening, there’s going to be games and books …

Games is likely to see me in the truck a fair bit. I was back in Euro Truck Sim 2 for the first time in a month today after getting fed up with the narrow roads. American Truck Sim has much bigger trucks and loads on much bigger roads. It’s curious seeing the differences between the two games. The Motorsport Manager campaign has continued, I’m about to go back into the top tier with my 4th team in a campaign that’s reached the year 2060.

Last thing – book ! Since seeing a “reading streak” thing appear in the iPad Kindle since allowing that to update, I’ve been getting a little or a lot of reading in every day. And I’ve been really enjoying that. The Worst of All Possible Worlds had a very satisfying conclusion to that trilogy and I’m intrigued by where John Scalzi is going with The Human Division, which is book 5 (really book 4) in the Old Man’s War series. He’s setting up an interesting universe situation where things may not go well for the humans and I’m curious as to where he’s going to go with it.

I’m also looking forwards to heading into Head Case, book two of the Starship for Sale series.

Reading is fun. Would recommend.

Picture. A person sitting in a chair, reading a book. The caption is "I found a 100 per cent foolproof way to prevent sunburn. It's called "Stay inside and read a book." Subtitle on there is "someecards" user card.
Seems legit

And it’s good for avoiding sunburn too. Stay safe everyone, be well.

May resemble puddle

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July 17, 2022

9:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

We have a heatwave on …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is parked on a planet, to the right of shot. We're pointing towards an orange sun that is dominating the horizon. We can only see half of it, stretching across three quarters of the picture.
Fetch the sunburn lotion !

It’s been a while since I did spaceships actually ! One of my strategies for not getting too hot currently involves adding as little heat as I can to the situation :-D. And as Elite Odyssey maxes out the graphics card, I haven’t been in that game for a while. Computer do work, computer make heat. But that’s ok because there’s other games that are still really enjoyable but don’t need the computer to do as much work.

Like Motorsport Manager, it’s now reached the mid 2050s in my campaign and I’m about to move up to the next higher up league. I still play this one so much because it gives good racing to watch and it’s still a challenge to get the win in there, although I do know a lot of the tricks and ways to make strategies work. (A lot of that is math).

American Truck Simulator has been good as well.

Game screenshot. American Truck Simulator. Our mostly black truck is on a road in the foreground, driving to left of shot. Behind, is a sandy scene sparsely populated with light grasses. Mountains are in the distance but a bit closer, there are a series of radio telescope dishes pointing upwards.
Hunting for signals

The Truck Games are nicely chilled out. I think one reason I like them is that I can set a route up through the World of Trucks system (or the non online options) and just go. And that’s about the limit of the thought required. I can give Brain a rest while being in the game. Other games need a bit too much Brain than I’m willing to give in order to learn them, or the gameplay isn’t restful.

I might actually be taking advantage of the heat … got the freezer doing a defrost at the moment. It’s actually been a good opportunity for that, I’ve only had to chip away the ice a couple of times in the last month to break my ice cubes free.

I know, being domestic. Out of character.

Not looking forward to tomorrow, we’re expecting temperatures around 37 degrees C, in UK houses that aren’t set up to handle that kind of temperature. I’ll have my fans going all day … I may actually do an out of the house run tomorrow evening … The car got the air con and so will the cinema for a potential hiding in an air con building for a while.

Going into the office isn’t viable, it’s not going to be particularly habitable in there at the moment. (Air recirculation, no cooking and buildings that catch the heat). I do need to be going back into the office more though, being static at home isn’t doing me much good.

What else has been going on ? Lots of cricket on the telly, with series ongoing involving the England ladies and England men teams. It’s been good to watch, especially with newcomers like Issy Wong coming through to the senior side. She’s raw and has a lot of potential with the bowling. Sophia Dunkley is already regularly turning that potential into match winning performances. It’s good to see. Not sure if I’m seeing similar potential come through to the men’s side but we’ll see there.

Books have been happening too. Still in the middle of Helsreach, but I did complete Starship for Sale by M.R. Forbes. That one’s well worth a look. It’s worth mentioning that you can dip in and out of this one quickly due to the chapters being really short … And it rattles along at a merry pace with our two boys Matt and Ben being whisked along on a wild ride as (spoilers …). It saves up some surprises right up to the end too. Worth a peek, not just for Matt and Ben, and I’m curious to see how the story unfolds during the next books.

I’m currently in The Worst of All Possible Worlds, third in the series by Alex White where we have magic and technology intermixed in a sci fi space universe. It’s good and I’m very curious as to how he wraps up this trilogy. It’s been pretty blood thirsty (and caution warning – creative with that too, there’s lots of description of gore).

Right – I’d better sign off and fetch something cold again … Tashnarr stream is on (which is also convenient because it takes very few cpu cycles to show a stream, therefore less heat!) and I’m feeling like diving into book again.

Stay safe everyone, hopefully find some chilliness amongst the heat.

Hello it’s toasty

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July 9, 2022

11:07 pm

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Hello again,

Me again – I think I’ve needed a bit of a rest from writing things. Could be because I’m diving more into the work stuff again, where I put the energy into what I’m doing in working hours and feel more like chilling out with reading or games in the evening with that resulting in me not really wanting to write stuff. But it’s more like having trouble hitting the Add New Post button despite having things to talk about.

Picture. An orange dog is lying down in a big collection of ice cubes. The caption is "It's too bloody hot today"
Yes I know. I have summoned the spelling bees

It has gone very warm here … I last did spaceships on the 12th of June and there’s no way I’ll go back until things cool down a bit. Elite pushes the graphics card really hard (because it’s an unoptimised mess) and that turns into heat going into the room. So no space ship for a bit. That said though … it’s still pretty.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at an icy white planet marred only by the tyre tracks of our buggy. Our pilot is standing on a rock to the bottom left. Our buggy is parked behind, with 6 red lit wheels. A spaceship is parked beyond. The sky is a lovely pink on the left transitioning to purple on the right.
Preparing to scout

This is the latest ship in the fleet, the Searching for Chamomile. The callsign is T-CK13 after the lovely Teacakes 13 (Twitch link) who battles various health issues (don’t we all !) and time availability (same again – day job!) to bring us no commentary gameplay streams of No Mans Sky. That’s another space game which I should have a look at but I keep bouncing off it for some reason.

Anyway, I thought I’d make my latest objective be one of exploring planets again and checking out the wildlife. All my scout ships (well, most of them 😀 ) are named Searching For … things and this time Chamomile came up as a hardy plant. Haven’t done much in that quest yet, I’ll wait for things to cool down a bit.

One thing spaceship related that I have been enjoying is watching Psyche’s streams. She’s a bubbly bundle of chaos from Northern Ireland who likes streaming the space games and there’s also been lots of Rimworld chaos too. Well worth checking out. Here’s the old twitch linky thing. I haven’t been watching long at all but with me rearranging who some of my Twitch subscriptions go to, she’ll be getting one of the ones that have been cancelled.

So – Twitch subs … what’s that mean ? The benefits include little emote pictures that you can use across Twitch chats. Plus it gives a bit of money to the streamer which means they can continue entertaining us on the screen instead of having to … quit that and get an actual job in order to afford rent, food and electricity and the other things.

Twitch is feeling like a rough place for streamers. The organisation takes way too high a cut of the money that viewers send in, plus because it’s live, you pretty much have to choose one (or maybe two) only to watch at once. So at the moment, it’s having fun watching Tashnarr playing Subnautica. She’s doing hard core runs where if you die, it’s new save time. Not dead yet tonight but there’s been a couple of close calls. Tash is always great fun to watch and put daftness into chat with.

Oh and sometimes the Twitch people will play a game you’re interested in and give you an idea of whether you’d want to buy it. Or they play games like No Mans Sky where you enjoy other people playing more than you enjoy the game itself.

Game screenshot. American Truck Simulator. We're looking at a roadway on a small bridge. In the distance we can see a shallow waterfall. Our green truck is on the right.
Water … falling

I’ve been enjoying switching from the European roads over to American Truck Simulator with map packs appearing courtesy of the Steam sale that’s just finished. It’s curious seeing the differences between the two games. Both ATS and European Truck Sim 2 use the same underlying engine, the trucks and roads are different. American trucks have the long noses, European trucks are more of a slab front with the engine underneath. It feels like the loads are heavier in the US trucks, although that could be what the World of Trucks service offers. The US roads are definitely more forgiving than the occasionally very tight European roads. But the European maps have more features in them and things to look at.

Whereas I was feeling frustrated in the Euro game, I’ve been enjoying playing with the American trucks.

Oh ! Did I get anything in the Steam sale ? I bought Fermi Paradox and Disco Elysium plus soundtracks for Skyrim, Rimworld and the two games above. Fermi Paradox is a game about development of alien civilisations, Disco Elysium is a role playing adventure game where you’re a cop who’s lost his memory and he has to investigate a rather curious murder. But not all is as it seems.

I’d better wrap up soon so I can dive into book … Reading has been happening, much reading. Completed books from the last few weeks are :

Dune – think I mentioned that. I’m not sure if I’ll even go into Dune Messiah to be honest.

Machine by Elizabeth Bear was an interesting one. Perhaps a bit too much in the psychology side but I was kept in there by a highly intriguing unfolding mystery.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi was book 3 in his Old Man’s War series. This is in a developing universe of his where humanity goes to the stars, to find that they’re pretty crowded with alien races. Most of whom don’t like humans much, mostly due to how humans treat them. Nothing new there, good commentary :-D. I’ll be curious to see how this moves on in Book 5 (book 4 is an alternate perspective retelling of book 3). J.Scalzi is a good author to keep coming back to.

Current books are Starship for Sale by M.R.Forbes. It’s heavy on the world building with it being the first book in a series but that’s ok. It’s good world building. Our two friends start out going to a Virtual Reality games place and before they know it, they’re being hustled into buying an odd starship with a very curious occupant. I’m enjoying it, will come back for more in the series. Oh and “books” is Helsreach from the 40k universe. I have a 30+ day reading streak going in Kindle at the moment and Helsreach is a paper back. So I’m in two books to keep that Kindle streak.

Nearly went to see cinema things yesterday, chose chilling out instead. It’s been a while …

Picture. A hopefully looking dog is looking up directly at the camera. The captions are "I see you haz a hot dog ..." and "I too like hot dogs"
Hmmm. Hot dogs

I like hot dogs, good cinema munchie. Oh, another reason I didn’t go is because Everything Everywhere has pushed out and while the latest Thor and Top Gun sequel have potential, wasn’t feeling it yesterday. Maybe next Friday. I was feeling a bit blasted yesterday after I closed up the work laptop.

Work’s been going well after I switched late last year. It was good catching up with one of the people from the old team too when being in the office on Wednesday this week. But if you know what I mean by Spoons, I throw all my spoons at the work stuff at the moment and it doesn’t leave that many over for home stuff. That’s one reason why I like the Truck Games, they don’t need much real thought while giving a definite sense of Progress happening.

Motorsport Manager is another I’m continuing to enjoy, after almost 1900 hours now. But that one needs a bit more thought.

Time to devote some of those thoughts to enjoying Tashnarr (still not dead yet) and Starship for Sale.

Be well everyone ! Stay Safe. Try not to let what’s happening in the world (it crazy innit) get you down.

Lording it …

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June 20, 2022

10:05 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while again hasn’t it. I think I was getting ready to post something up again and then bugs hit … Thumbnail ?

Picture. Cartoon. A grizzled cowboy is lurking behind a bush holding a rope that is connected to a plank of wood holding up a big box. The box is poised to drop over a book case. An unsuspecting stick man approaches ...
Yep, this would work

So … what’s been happening ? Bugs, books and … there’s gotta be another B word in there. Nope, not coming … Went to Lords as well for the Interservices T20. More on that later and pictures for another post. Le Mans watching happened as well, plus I had last week off work. Timed that to coincide with a couple of recovery days after Le Mans and the Interservices cricket.

What’s first – games are always up there … Looking backwards, I’ve indulged in another run through Deus Ex Human Revolution and the sequel Mankind Divided will follow. I dunno quite what it is I like about those games. They don’t do everything that other fps do but what they get absolutely right is the core gameplay. They’re very solid games and have a good story running through them.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Human Revolution. We're looking at a holographic display. It looks like a series of hexagonal dot lights on a hemisphere. Inside, we see a globe that could be the Moon. To the right, we see a big wall mounted display with a prospective Moon Base.
May not contain actual moon base

(Spoiler – not been to the Moon in game but there will hopefully be a third game made to finish off this story properly, it might go to the Moon).

I really enjoy these games and while the 2012 Human Revolution does look dated if you know what to look for (the polygon maps are pretty blocky), it still looks the part and plays great. Looking forwards to moving on to Mankind Divided again. While I kinda bounced off Horizon Zero Dawn (also a first person role playing game shooter), I happily go back to the newer Deus Ex games as comfort games. I dunno, it’s kinda, I know what to do, how to play them so I can enjoy the game without needing to learn new systems for how to play it.

Motorsport Manager has also been happening … with a tendency to have sore wrists and arms, having a hands off game that’s still very engaging has been very valuable. That’s why it’s hit 1844 hours played since being released in Nov 2016 … I hit the end of Phase 3 of my self made challenge there, thought about restarting but have gone into a Phase 4 instead. Phases ?

Phase 1 – win the championship with the F1 style car.

Phase 2 – win the next championship with GT racing cars.

Phase 3 – win the last championship with the 6 hour race endurance cars.

And now I’m back to Phase 1 in the F1 style cars with the worst team I could join and I’ll build that up to where it beats the first team I built.

It’s a fairly hands off game, where you directly do the setups (this can be modded out) and the race strategy. The AI does a good job on its end too although changes from wet to dry weather catch it out.

And I can happily play it too whereas I haven’t opened Truck Game since 1st June because I was getting frustrated with road traffic accidents from murderous AI and it was hurting my wrist and arm.

Bugs … Yep. Had bugs. Pretty sure these were from a work reconnect event, the boss had the bugs as well at pretty much the same time. And there was someone who almost certainly brought in the fast flu that did the rounds around then. Anyway, that affected me for about a week, at which point I was in need of some downtime anyway. Pretty sure it wasn’t anything more sinister than a fast flu. I’m double vaccinated and boosted against the Plague plus I’m pretty sure I had it two years ago. This flu was affecting me but it wasn’t nearly as bad as probable covid with its coughing so much I think I blacked out a couple of times and assorted other symptoms.

Lords happened last week. I’ve been noticing increasing reclusiveness tendencies where I’ll take an excuse to stay in and do stuff indoors instead of heading out. So I haven’t been to the cinema much at all lately because I’ve been either bugged or enjoying the cricket on the telly. Wouldn’t mind seeing Everything Everywhere All At Once, that’s top of the list. Also Top Gun 2, maybe Doctor Strange but with what I’ve heard about Jurassic World 3, maybe not that one.

Lords ?

Picture. We're looking at a wide expanse of green cricket field, with the cut strips in the middle. The grass is cut as a checkerboard grid of various greens. 2 players wear red, the rest wear blue. In the background, the light red of the Lords Pavilion and to the right is the white double decker Warner stand.
Lovely day for it

Lords was splendidly turned out as usual. It’s a really old stadium now (opened in 1814) and they’ve steadily rebuilt, maintained and upgraded it over the years. It still has the signature slope (look at the advertising boards in front of the Pavilion) and the Old Father Time weathervane is still hanging out. I was a little disappointed that the big shop is gone and replaced with a smaller one. That’s part of the redevelopment of two of the stands (out of shot) which have been rebuilt into double decker stands now with shade. I sat in the old version for a session one year and I was absolutely baking and had to retreat to shade. One curiosity was that there was a big toilet area behind the old stands, that’s gone now. (Replaced by more loos under the stands).

It was a bit of a wrench to get away from the house but I enjoyed the day thoroughly. I might have to look into overnight stopping in the future though, leaving the house at before 7am and returning at past 11pm makes for a very long day even with most of it being chilling out in the stands watching the game and occasionally trying to capture the good bits.

Picture. We're zoomed in on the big green cricket field from before. In the centre, we see the 3 dark blue stumps of the wicket. To the right is a man in blue with batting pads, gloves and helmet. The bat has gone through a shot. To the left is a man in red and black wearing keeping pads and the gloves. He is clutching the ball in his hands. There is another man in red and black in the foreground looking away from us.
Disappointed batter, happy keeper

That’s me with the normal compact digital camera (Canon Ixus 265, disclosure note : all bits bought by me) with it zoomed in to its optical limit. I have it braced on my knee for the shots. Most of them turned out pretty well and have the action centred although there were a number of junk ones where I moved the camera off target. I need to see what I have, you can’t see much on the mobile phone screen. I was happy with the picture above, it’s from the instant that the keeper held on to a thin edge from the batsman for another wicket.

Last bit for today – I’ve been going through some books lately …

Not sure if I said anything about A Bad Deal For The Whole Galaxy (Alex White). It’s book 2 of a space opera series set in a universe where magic and technology intermingle. He’s done a cracking job with the two books so far and I’ll go back to the conclusion soon. I’d thoroughly recommend them as something different. First book is A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe.

Read Dune again. Honestly didn’t enjoy that. It feels somewhat dated now. The pacing is mixed, so some parts feel like they stall while he’s world building, some parts with the big story moments feel very rushed. I like the idea of the personal shields … but the interaction with the lasguns feels very wrong to me. (They go boom spectacularly). That felt like a Plot Hammer that just didn’t make sense to me. And those go pretty much all the way through the book.

Dune is a great story … I’d recommend watching any of the movies. Yep. Even the David Lynch one. Especially the SyFy miniseries. And even the new half a movie. They all tell the story in a far more active way than in the rather drawn out book. I’ll go back to books 2 and 3 at some point but I’m expecting another grind. I won’t go further into Dune than that.

Next up was Machine by Elizabeth Bear. A curious book. It has a great mystery in it that’s set up by a space trauma rescue specialising doctor in a space ambulance heading off to check out a historic generation ship that’s mysteriously appeared going too fast in the wrong place. Oh and there’s another modern ship in trouble next to it. The generation ship people are in cryosleep, everything’s abandoned. And our trauma rescue doctor lady is trying to figure out what’s happened. I really enjoyed the mystery unfolding through the book.

What I didn’t enjoy was the “woke” nature running all the way through. The author is very big on right minding and makes it a core theme of the book. I’d very happily live in her world. It’s a great world and I heartily agree with the principles. They’re just laid on very thick, they’re constantly there and it’s just a little too much and I thought it became a distraction. But I was highly enjoying the various AI, human and other species characters Elizabeth Bear creates for the book and as said, it’s a scifi universe I’d love to live in. Compare that to the seductive Starship Troopers, which sucks you in to Yay! Heinlein! until you ask whether you’d want to live in that world. Even without the Bugs, that’s a nope.

Next up is The Last Colony by John Scalzi, it’s book 3 in the Old Man’s War series. Now there’s a universe you’d think twice about living in. It’s very deathy :-D. And I’m enjoying it so far. Scalzi has a fun writing style that keeps me amused.

I think that’s enough for today. I’ll almost certainly develop a few more of these later.

Oh ! Lego happened too.

Seeya ! Be safe, stay well.

Watching racing, thinking cars

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May 30, 2022

3:35 pm

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Hello everyone,

I enjoyed watching quite a bit of the Nurburgring 24 hours race this weekend …

Picture. We're looking at the tarmac of a racetack snaking a route through grassy banks to the sides. There are quite a few race cars in diverse colours making their way through, all with headlights on. We can see a few spots of rain on the camera. The caption to the top right is "Total 24 Nurburgring Formation Lap".
Brrrmm

This was actually from the race held in September 2020. It’s normally held a couple of weeks before the Le Mans 24 hour race which aims for the longest days of the year with a little bit of separation to allow drivers and cars to compete in both if able to. The weather this year was far better … previous years have seen the race suspended overnight due to fog or just too dangerous conditions but they got a full uninterrupted 24 hours of running in this year.

It’s a classic race, I enjoyed watching it a lot this time around. And there’s something I find way too fascinating about having the timing screen up instead of the actual cars and watching the sector time numbers steadily collect there. Especially if a faster car has had a problem, got repaired and is catching up through the field again. Or a slower car is steadily gobbling up fast cars that have retired from the race several hours before.

Stats ! It’s run on the Nurburgring Nordschlieffe course which is in the various racing games. I tried it when I played Forza Motorsport way back. Here’s a wiki link. The 24 hour race is held on a layout that includes the 3.2 mile (5.1km) Grand Prix circuit for a total of 15.77 miles or 25.378km. It’ll take the fast GT3 cars 8 minutes 15 seconds to cover that on a fastest lap, or the Dacia Logan taking 11 minutes 46 seconds on their fastest lap.

I like it more when I can adopt? a car to follow for the race and see how its doing throughout the race. Sure, the racing at the top is pretty close and spectacular, like when the Van Thoor Manthey Porsche slightly tapped another car on a fast part of the circuit and pirouetted itself a heap of times before hammering into the barriers. It bounced off a car driven by the other Van Thoor brother too so the commentators were speculating for a while about christmas card lists in the Van Thoor family :-D. But I think I connect more with the little guys, the underdogs, the ones that people write off as having no chance but they’ll keep on punching on reminding you that they’re there waiting to slip ahead when you make a mistake.

And the little Dacia Logan outdid super fast cars like this :

Picture. We're looking at the grass run off area beside a race track on the left edge of the screen. There is a car, stopped, with the back end engulfed in flame with black smoke rising to the left. The caption is "KTM X-Bow GTX".
Toast is good. Toasty cars … not so much

This was one of the oddest things I’ve seen in racing for quite a few years. Before I go on – driver escaped fine and the only things hurt were the grass, several bits of barrier and the car itself. What happened ? The cameras caught the KTM car on fire with the driver looking for a good spot to abandon it. The flames were pretty much out as the car was stopped and the driver jumped out. However … this is where the weird comes in.

Apparently the car wanted to continue racing and set off again, sans driver, down the steep hill. The flames then reignited … Several more cars came through and avoided the fireball before it took an early left and embedded itself in a roadside barrier. The marshals quickly got the fire under control again and the incident was pretty much done again.

Most races would see this being handled under a full course yellow or safety car but this isn’t really practical or sensible for a nearly 16 mile race track. So what they do instead is to have the area with marshals under a Code 60 protocol with a strict 60km/h speed limit. They’ll have a Slow Zone before with a strict 120km/h limit and waved yellow flags before to make it safe for the track marshals to work and return the track to a safe state for racing. I.e. a small portion of the track under a local speed control with the rest of the track under green flag unrestricted racing.

Yep. Enjoyed the race again this year and it was good to see excellent conditions throughout with occasional rain to add even more interesting times for the teams during the second half.

Post Part 2 time !

One thing about the race is the variation in cars taking place. The fastest cars are GT3 standard, so road going race cars like the Porsche cars, the fast Mercs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and even the hideous BMW M4. Hopefully the Lexus cars will be back as well, they’ve brought the RC F variant of the IS cars I had before. That’s like … a 2 door coupe version of this car :

Picture. We're looking at two saloon cars with swept back aerodynamic roofs. The one behind is red, the foreground and to the right one is silver grey.
Yesterday’s Shinies

Whereas those had 220bhp and a hybrid electric drive, the RC F loses a couple of doors, goes a bit lower, they swap out the powertrain for a 460hp V8 cylinder 5 litre engine and send it round a racetrack. Bit like what BMW will do with their higher spec M cars. The N24 race also includes cars more like what we’d have though, like Hyundai i30N’s, Toyota Corollas, there were a collection of VW Golfs of various ages, Opel Astras and … the Dacia Logan. The Dacia was being a bit of a running joke because it was taking 50% longer to go round the course than the fast cars but … it kept going and came 98th out of the 135 cars taking part despite losing about 90 minutes that would have kept it competitive with the other 4 cars in its class. The two Corolla Altis were doing better than the GT86 car that was also in their class.

So … post part 2 ? I’m warming up the thinking to what the next car I get will be. It’ll be a Toyota again for a bit because I put myself on a multi year servicing deal (might have oopsed there) but Lexus don’t make a car I want to buy any more so I’ll be moving away from that brand. The UX is their small car now and its SUV doesn’t have much sport and little utility. The ES that I have now is too big, as are the other cars in their range since they put the CT/Prius and the IS in the bin.

To be honest though, I’d rather drop a size and cost level and go for the highest spec in a cheaper range than read the manual, see shiny features (even down to a kick open boot release) that aren’t included in the car I get.

Because I like shiny things and I was sad when nothing happened when I waved my foot under the back of the car as well as other things in the manual that weren’t in my car this time. So one thing that might happen next is go for a top spec Lexus CT from the last year they were sold, instead of having something new.

One thing I find odd though is that manufacturers look as if they’re tuning their ranges … SUVs are taking over (I’m not a fan of SUVs) and car makers are either going small or big. Vauxhall don’t sell the Cavalier any more. The Dacia Logan from N24 isn’t for sale any more. Honda aren’t bringing the Integra to the UK.

It feels like an odd trend. Perhaps they’re looking forwards in time to when petrol and diesel cars are stopped from sales. Or they’re recovering from the Dieselgate scandals. One huge consideration for me though is what car I’ll find myself in at the end of the decade … because unless politics change, it’ll be the last car I get due to electric not being a good option for me. I’d have to charge it on a public road with a cable going across a pavement – that ain’t an option and I bet I’m pretty common with that consideration. If you live in a flat, where are you supposed to charge the car up ?

What am I looking at as the options at the moment ? Considerations are : Speed but economical. Toys. Comfort. Size bracket. Being able to put shopping supplies in the boot. The Lexus UX fails utterly on the boot.

I’m actually looking at the latest Puma, even if it is an SUV style. It would feel weird to be back in a Ford after the horrid 2002 Focus ST … but I wouldn’t be captive to an emergency buy this time. The original Puma sports coupe was a lovely little car.

There’s also the latest Corolla hybrid, Lexus should really be looking at bringing a posh version of this out like they did with the CT / Prius. They did a wonderful job with the CT, delivering a solid ultra high quality conversion of the Prius which had them break through into the UK market which was continued with the faster IS300h that I was seeing in work’s car park a lot. It’s weird that they discontinued both CT and IS.

Audi looked ok until you started adding in the options. Similar with BMW and Merc. Vauxhall were a nope (plug in hybrid isn’t an option). And I wouldn’t touch a French car unless thoroughly convinced otherwise. Mazda are a curious one. I wonder why the MX-5 Miata isn’t at Nurburgring … perhaps they can’t fit the safety stuff into them.

Volvo are off the list because their cars are too big. Will have to expand the research a bit while being careful about what any magazines I get say.

Last bit – we had a work trip last week that allowed a bit more research … I’ve enjoyed having decent satnavs in the Lexii, although the last two have had deficiencies come in. (The last IS was an utter failure at last mile navigation, i.e. the most important bit, the destination point can be difficult to set on the ES satnav). This time, we used Android Auto as the satnav. It actually worked really well, with two phones connected to the car quickly and the signal staying good throughout.

However … the reason we used two phones is that sending the signal continuously through Bluetooth murders the battery and we didn’t have charging facilities. My impression was that Android Auto is very viable as a satnav … but I won’t be using it because it connects to one phone only, so I’d have to think of something to allow my music to be used. I wonder if I’d be able to satnav off the old iPodPhone I have, that might sort out that one.

(My main phone is a Pixel 4. Is good phone. My music comes off an iPhone 5, which is staying on an ancient version of iOS so that it talks to an equally ancient version of iTunes. I can’t update them. Similarly, I can’t allow the iPodPhone to connect to the internet because it’s hilariously exposed on security.)

So there’s another big consideration – getting satnav and music via two different devices.

I think that’s it for now though. Time to have a little diversion looking at Mazda’s site to see what they got :-D.

Stay safe everyone, be well.