Category: games

Living that disabled (temporary) game life

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October 22, 2025

4:50 pm

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games, health

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Hello everyone,

A comment while watching a stream last night struck a chord in me. It was about being curious and interested in how I’ve been tackling experiencing things in my current condition of having one arm mostly disabled. I’m lucky in that this condition should be temporary and that after everything heals I’ll have mostly two arms again but … I’ll have a good few months to manage until then.

Picture. T shirt design. We're looking at a cute cartoon panda, sitting in a gaming chair with a console controller on their lap. In the background, outlines of laptop, PC, controllers and screens. The caption is "This is my happy place".

(Design is by the wonderful Teeturtle people) As said above, I still have both arms and the other limbs. I can still use all of my fingers and thumbs. It’s just that the left arm is very heavily damaged and I can’t use it very much at the moment. So what’s the current situation there ?

Picture. We're looking at an arm, heavily wrapped up in a white cotton wool cast. The fingers and thumb can be seen popping out at the end. There is also a big red dwagon.

There we go. That’s my arm. You can just see a bit of red there, that’s the plaster part of a sugar tong splint cast that’s been stabilizing the shattered bones in my wrist as they repair themselves. The plaster part is a very long U that goes all the way to the back of my elbow and back and it’s encased in the fabric you can see there. It’s too big to get a long sleeve over … but that’s ok because I can manage getting t-shirts on and off and I have a warm sleeveless woolly jumper from my cricket days that works.

It is a bit heavy though, which isn’t good with the shoulder damage I have as well. That amounts to a currently restricted range of movement plus soreness. There’s a bunch of bits of metal in there that are holding the joint together and I’m under instructions to not stress the shoulder joint until at least December by attempting to lift anything.

That’s like …. holding an empty coffee mug is ok. Holding a full mug of coffee – I’ll get instant messages from the shoulder that amount to “WATCH IT”. When I attempted to transfer an almost full 4 pint thing of milk back to the fridge, the message turned into “DROP IT”. And I think I did I little bit of short term damage by doing the laundry and hanging that out the other weekend. The main symptom from that has gone away but I’ll confer with the physio about it tomorrow. I think I’ll have the wrist back fairly soon but it’s going to take a lot more time for the shoulder to repair.

So while I’m managing to cope with a lot of IRL chore stuff, what’s it mean for the Gaming Is My Happy Place ?

Game screenshot. Truck. We're on a rough path in a spooky, dark place. Our truck is in the bottom right, sporting a pink ribbon. The lights are pointing towards a cave shaped like the open maw of a dragon.

WSAD type games where you move by pressing keys on the left side of the keyboard are completely out at the moment. I can do limited two handed typing but the cast puts my arm at a funny angle which is very much less than comfortable. I can’t keep it up for long. Similar with the controller gameplay with the trucks …

Picture. We're looking at my left hand in the cast just being able to grip the edge of an Xbox style controller. The small red dwagon looks on from the right.

Yeah I’m being flaky at the moment, hopefully that’ll go away when the cast comes off. If I have the controller at a good angle there, I can support the weight on a knee while my left middle finger does the brake, my first finger does the indicator and my thumb does the steering on the analogue stick. It’s not precise but it is very playable for the Truck Games and it feels like it’s getting easier.

Worth noting as well that I have owned a steering wheel controller for years but I’m not using it because it takes a bit of set up and I don’t think attempting that often will be a good idea considering the extreme weight limit on my left shoulder.

The other note is the wire sticking out there. I could connect this controller up via Bluetooth but I never installed the antennae in the new PC. If you consider that the case the new PC is in weighs 13kg and then add more kg for the components, you’ll understand why I’m not considering lifting and holding that box in place with my left arm while I install the antennae with my right hand. Wired works fine.

It’s indicative of another limit that’s in place though for me while the healing happens. Will have to watch this space to see how that develops. Space ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at our squat mostly pink ship pointing towards us landed on a white rocky planet. In the background is a large white planet in a starfilled sky, the planet is part obscured by an erupting white steam geyser.

I can Space ! Well, partial space at least. I use one of these now for the Elite Dangerous.

Picture. We're looking at my hand in the cast attempting to grip the throttle lever side of a joystick and controller. The hand can grip perhaps just half of the throttle lever. The small red dwagon sits between throttle and stick.

That’s my ageing Thrustmaster Hotas X. Hotas stands for Hands On Throttle And Stick and it’s from the fighter pilot world where the idea is that the pilot can do everything they need to do while keeping their hands on the throttle and stick at all times. They’ll also have rudder pedals. I don’t have those but there’s a twist action in the flightstick side that does that function for me. The way this works in my Elite set up is that pitch, roll and yaw is done on the flight stick while moving left, right, forwards, back, up and down is done on the throttle.

You’ll see in the picture that I can’t fully grip the throttle lever, which means I can’t use the up and down or left right with my left hand because the front of the cast interferes too much. But the pattern of play I’m in with Elite current means I can adapt to that. You can be a lot slower in travel mode, take your time a bit more and it’s just fine. But I won’t be among the asteroids doing mining or wanting to go into a laser duel like that, I need the fine and fluent control that I don’t currently have.

That’s another reason why I won’t be playing first person shooter games for a while. I’d be able to do precise aiming with my right hand on the mouse but need fluent movement on WSAD on my left hand.

If the game only needs a mouse though, that’s just fine. That’s games like recent acquisitions that include :

Golden Lap – a simplified racing management simulator. Promising.

Two Point Museum – you errr … build a fantasy museum :-D.

Little Big Workshop – always enjoy disappearing into this one.

Tower Dominion – this was a great recommendation by the lovely Billietrixx.

And there are a few more too.

That’s the message I’d like to leave you with today. If you are suffering from a disability, whether tomprary like me or permanent, I really feel for you. I hope you’re able to adjust and manage it and come out of that with a situatuion that lets you enjoy your favourite things. It’ll take a bit of time for me to get back to 100% but I should get there. Someone I watch who has a permanent hand injury is the very lovely Tessachka (Twitch link). Tess has permanent damage to her hand which means she can’t do the thumb movements that shooty games on a controller demand. The way she’s adjusted is to have a mind blowing array of keyboards and trackballs to give her precise control over games I would avoid even when I had two good hands. And that solves her problem of not being able to use a controller and still hugely enjoy controller oriented games.

And she’s a lovely person to chat with in the streams too.

I better leave it there before I run out of hand points completely ! I’m going to be in a battered state for a while but … it’s not going to take the sky from me. Have a lovely evening everyone.

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Changes, updates and kinda hanging in there

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October 8, 2025

5:37 pm

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games, health, technology

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Hello everyone,

How are things going with you all ? Hope you’re doing ok. As for me, I’ve had another couple of runs to the hospitals (routine stuff) and I’m getting started on the rehab. Life’s had to change a little bit down here, as you’d expect from being mostly down an arm. I should get most of the mobility back, although I can feel that the left wrist is still quite delicate. Oh and I’ve been told that playing games can also be a decent part of rehab activity.

How’s that ! Not sure if I quite believe that but I’ll go with it. Talking of the games, I got a care package through …

Picture. We're looking at a selection of goodies. In the background, there is a square shaped light green coloured plushie with Intel written on it on a white patch. It has a pair of small white arms. To the left, a Get Well Soon card. My large red dwagon is to the right propping up a circular Creator Meetups UK coaster with their orange and white arrow and blue and white arrow.

That’s a plushie from the Intel people who were a key sponsor for the September Creator Meetups event. There’s a get well soon card with a lovely message. A Creator Meetups coaster and my red dwagon there is sporting a event sash (actually wristband, don’t tell the dwagon). There’s also a t-shirt, although that’s not in the picture.

The care package was a lovely thing to open today. I’ll talk more about the event some time but for now, I’ll keep it to just mentioning the Intel part … they were one of the main sponsors, which helps to make events like the last Creator North happen. We need their support and it’s hugely appreciated. I think they (could have been Asus too) were running the PC speed build thing at the latest event which was fun to keep an eye on. I didn’t take part in that … I’m excessively careful when I’m building my PCs so speed running them isn’t something I’d do but it was good to peek at.

Talking of PC building … it’s shameless shill time ! Bunny is an AMD build but I figured I owe Intel a mention, both due to the care package and for them supporting the events that they do. Disclosure note – the care package is a gift, attendance of the event was paid for by me, Pumpkin PC (about to mention) was fully bought by me, no other compensation has been received. I.e. this is an unprompted post.

Picture, cartoon. We're looking at an L shaped desk with two computer monitors and keyboard on it. The monitors have faces. The left one says "It's new year's, what's your resolution", the right one says "Same as always 1024 by 768"

So I mentioned that my current build is AMD, my longest serving PC is still Pumpkin built Oct 31 2011, going until July 2019. Pumpkin did really well and was super reliable. I don’t look for extreme speed in a PC, that tends to double the price for not really that much extra speed. I look for a build that I can put together, set up and then forget about for years while I watch videos and game on it. And Pumpkin excelled at that. The only technical issues it had was a Corsair power supply popping and the motherboard sound hardware popping.

And that was the trend with Intel for a very long time. They had a performance edge on AMD until recently but what they excelled at was lazy reliable performance. They could do what they do incredibly reliably and without fuss. Hassle free computing is exactly what I go for. So why did I go away from the Sandy Bridge i5-2500k powered Pumpkin ? It was struggling for performance in games due to only having 8GB of system memory. It was approaching time to change in 2019 and I’m glad I did because we all know what happened in 2020. Almost 8 years service is a phenomenal amount of time for a PC to be properly good for.

Picture. A small kitten is stretched across a laptop keyboard. The captions are "Ctrl Alt Delete Cat" "needs someone to hold alt"

What would I get if I went Intel now ? Here’s a Partpicker link. That’s pretty much the same bits as the new Bunny PC except for the Intel core in there. The prices are about the same too. The Intel chip has a lot more cores than my AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3d at a count of 16+8 vs 8 doubling to 16 threads for the AMD. Not entirely sure what the 24+8 means …

That’s another thing actually … The Partpicker list there is fairly arbitrary although I can vouch for case, RAM, psu, graphics and SSD. I’d need to know the difference between the P and E cores. And that’s where the research comes in. It’s a lot of money to invest, gotta be sure you’re investing in the right bits.

How about me though ?

The hospital visit last week was to get an initial follow up and they changed my cast as well. Oh and I may have hit a food allergy event too. So … good visit, bad consequences for me because I didn’t realise that the cookies I’d been munching and the giant Twix all had soya within and I can’t tolerate soya. Oh well. But I did get a slightly lighter cast, some basic physio exercises and advice that playing computer games on controllers would help with the rehab. Oh and I don’t need the arm sling any more.

Good results both there and a local hospital visit with a very lovely physio who gave me a few more exercises for the rehab and an injection of hope in getting all better. Having a little hope is ultra valuable.

How about that gaming though ?

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're looking out from inside a truck cab, over the top of the dashboard and steering wheel. We're on a straight road with grass and fence to the sides with buildings and another truck ahead. A satnav panel is to bottom right.

I’ve had a couple of Truck Game sessions so far. It’s a little awkward because I use a Xbox style controller. The left hand needs to cover the d-pad for set and forget options like lights and wipers. The middle finger does the brakes, first finger is left indicator and thumb does steering. Awkward but possible. The drawback with the two Truck Games is that when you start a run, you really need to finish it and my State of Being at the moment means that when I hit a certain point, I will need to STOP pretty much immediately which isn’t compatible with having to finish the runs off.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in the green ship with two prongs overflying a pink ish planet. We've just overflown and are looking back at an enormous crater. On the horizon is another planet, we can just see its rings. The sky is dominated by purple nebula and stars.

And then there’s Elite Dangerous, which actually got me started doing two handed typing again.

I use a Thrustmaster Hotas X for Elite (linky). It’s a basic Hotas as they go. You can get a lot fancier and expensive than that (search VKB and Virpil) but the Hotas X has been solid, reliable and above all comforyable for me to play Elite with. The pitch, roll and yaw are all done on the right hand stick. The left hand throttle has the forward and back and a rocker arm I use for left and right. My left thumb uses buttons for up, down and boost.

I’m not fluent with the Hotas yet in Elite but I had enough for a short(ish) travel session of 54 jumps (a session would normally be around 200 jumps). I can’t fully grip the throttle side yet, just half of it. It’s enough for travel where you can’t go up/down/left/right, not for more fine control although I could manage the external camera which is how I get all the screenies.

Oh and the big bonus …. because I do a few things very quickly, like renaming screenshots, I started two handed typing again. Big result there. Oh and Elite offers up interesting places to land at where you can often set up a good view.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at out green spaceship landed on a stark white planet. Above right is a small looking grey white gas giant planet with bands of dark colour. To the left, the sky is dominated by the dusty brown of the stars of the galactic disc.

I better close up there …

I’m having to do a few changes. My snacking is much reduced (which is good) and I’m adjusting to having less in my left hand. I’ve been ticking off a few IRL achievements like being able to lace up the boots, although I still have very little grip strength and even less carrying strength. Haven’t attempted long sleeves yet or the laundry (weekend thing). I need to do more of the physio exercises to get mobility back.

I’m doing ok and am fully independent here in the house, within my limits. I’m very low on energy still but it has been good being in some of the games again.

Oh and the online communities I hang around have been wonderful and have sent a lot of love my way. It’s vastly appreciated.

Pictures meme. We're looking at 4 cartoon panels steadily getting closer to a fuzzy black cat. The captions read "I wish your year is full of nice things"

Credit to Purr.In.Ink there, they’re always coming out with these cute little cartoons with the best vibes.

Have a lovely day everyone :-).

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Time to resurface

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March 31, 2025

9:32 pm

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events, games, musing

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while ! I think I needed to dive under the covers for a little while. But first ! We need that thumbnail …

Picture. We're looking at two dinosaurs perched on the only part of a mountain still above water. They're looking over towards a wooden boat sailing away. The captions are "Oh crap was that today?" and "The first senior moment"

I think the big reason it’s been so long is a steady realisation that I’m probably descending deeper into the burn out, instead of thinking that I’d hit as far as I could go down and therefore the only way was to improve. Nah. I think the burn out is getting worse, if that’s possible. I’m hanging in there but there’s a general shell shocked feeling where I think I’ve retreated back within myself somewhat. Will have to see what I need to change to start recovering and improving. But first, what’s been happening outside of going into the shell for a couple of months ?

We left things last time in the middle of January. A massive highlight for this year was heading off to Megacon at the end of January. This was over in London at the Excel arena and I’d thoroughly recommend checking out this particular convention.

Picture. We're looking at a green haired lady in a yellow dress with black trim and white boots dancing in the middle of a square. She's facing us, holding up a purple fan in her right hand. In the background, a multitude of people looking at stands.

It’s a smaller convention than Comic Con, covering a lot of the same things. It’s perhaps a third of the size, so I was able to get around there a few times as well as just enjoy and soak up the vibes coming from the anime dancing ladies at the Performance Square. There was a lot of joy coming from watching them bounce around their stage. And wonderful vibes coming from the other dancing ladies off to the side, who were bouncing around as well.

It was just a wonderful, happy thing. And then there was what looked like an impromptu mass dance party later on. Amazing lovely happy vibes and it was wonderful to see.

I came away with some awesome loot too. The main reason I knew about Megacon was because I’d seen it on the wonderful Aby of Trayed and Tested‘s (Etsy link) Etsy page that’s at the link there. It’s always lovely to be recognised and a surprise too considering I’d only met Aby once before, at Insomnia 2024. Good to see them again and have a little natter.

Picture. We're looking at two red dragons, with a dice tray in the background and two sets of dice in the foreground. More info follows in the text.

The bits there include (there’s too much for alt-text there so here’s the list) :

A dice tray with rainbow coloured dragons flying.

A set of mostly transparent dice with real clouds inside (the d6 was hiding under Eeyore)

A set of larger green dice with yellow patterns and numbers on them.

A leather pouch to hold the dice tray and I keep the dice in there too.

A pink 3d printed dragon from Printing Like Rabbits.

And the Eeyore dragon that I picked up at one of the Welsh castles last year.

I’m definitely a person that mirrors the vibes of the people that I’m around, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. (Happy people make me happy, toxicity frustrates me) It’s why I went back to Trayed and Tested at Insomnia last year and why Megacon caught the eye as somewhere to go. Looking forward to Comic Con later in the year, plus there will be the UK Games Expo the weekend after.

Picture. We're looking at a cute white kitten with orange fur on the top of their head. The captions are "I need" "Hugs"

And then there was the day after … I had what I’ll call a health event. I won’t go into details except that there was a decent amount of blood escaping, I should have taken myself off to hospital to get seen to. I’m ok, it was messy but was under control quickly, hasn’t recurred since and I still have all the bits we should have.

But whereas I’d have quite liked to get the Megacon details locked in to memory with a post, that health event is something I’d quite like to delete from the memory. It rattled me for a little while that one.

Gosh, what else has been going on apart from that ? I haven’t been getting out much. I think that’s part of the burn out. I did take a week off a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about going up to the Lake District for a few days. Kinda like the Conwy Castle trip up to North Wales last year, except doing all of the arrangements myself this time.

Is it bad when you’re too mentally done to arrange stuff to help recover from being too mentally done ? Probably.

One thing that has happened since the last post is me doing the Space thing again …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at four buggies on an airless rocky planet. The buggies are parked looking away from us, in a line left to right. In the sky, we see dots of stars plus a small white blue sun.

The interest happened again due to the lovely Ninja Space Unicorn (Twitch link) kicking off an expedition in Elite Dangerous to head off to the far side of the galaxy and back. It caught the interest and so I’ve joined in with the streams so far. And they’ve been fun too, including the picture above where the 4 of us that day were all set up to do a buggy race around our landed space ships.

The expedition has been paused for a few weeks now due to IRL Stuff (we lost a friend far too soon) but having fun on the expedition made me look again at the second account I had from a giveaway from a different distributor (Ok it was Epic) … so I’m playing Elite on two accounts now. My main account is still 1000 light years above the centre of the galaxy but their carrier is supporting the alt account build up a star system.

That’s been another big draw, there were rumours at the start of the year that colonisation was coming to Elite. We could claim a system for our own and build stuff in there. Mine’s the Col 285 Sector ZU-L B9-2 gosh that’s a mouthful here’s an Inara link system. There are just two installations completed so far but I should be able to finish two more this week with what’s in the carrier … and then it goes faster from there for a little bit with smaller bases. And if you’ve had a look at that link and noticed something …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a spaceship mostly in shadow lower left. The engines are flaring out a white exhaust as the ship heads towards the opening into a cubical space station. The name "Here be Dwagons" is emblazoned below the entrance.

Yep. My home station is called Here Be Dwagons. It had to be :-D. And it’s been making me grin every time I go past the name in the list of things in the system. I do have a few more names in the Book Of Names. One will come soon because I have a farm station quite early in the build list. The other big name needs to wait until a medical facility is built. Other than that, looking for some really good names. There could well be a Space Unicorn themed name in there at some point.

Other stuff ? It’s April Fools Day tomorrow, I don’t have anything planned for that … although I did go back to childhood times by acquiring a game called Derail Valley. It’s a train driver simulator. It’s really early days in there for me but I’d point you towards Squirrel’s playlist of the game over on Youtube. He’ll tell you more about an interesting curious game with that progression system inside that you know I go for.

I think I better hit the post and publish button in a moment though … I’ve been keeping the reading going, I lost the reading streak again (oops) but I’ll be looking to do an A to Z of books thing this year. It’s supposed to be authors but I don’t think I’ll find enough variety there for all of the letters, so I’ll go with authors and titles.

Good to post again, I’ll try and not make it two months until the next one !

Have a great evening everyone.

PS Social media stuff ! I’ve abandoned Twixxer (the owner), I keep up to date on Bluesky (the author / creator communities are barmy wonderful fun) and most of the discords I’m in … I’ll post to Farcebook but I don’t keep up to date with what gets posted there (bad algorithm, too much).

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Advent Day 22 and we have a Crested Razor

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December 22, 2024

10:08 pm

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games

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Hello everyone,

What’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at the advent collection again, which is up to 21 models arranged on the snow scene, plus the dwagon on the left this time. The new one is on top of two dice, the big d20 at 20 and a d6 with the 2 lit up. The model is a spaceship, with a blocky centre, guns either side at the front and two engines, one each side high up in the middle.

It’s another entry from the Mandalorian today, with the Razor Crest on top of the dice there. Again, it’s a series I’ve never seen, I’ve just seen the memes and some of the stories around the series. I might get Disney+ at some point to catch up on things like this and Andor but … I’m not actually watching much series telly at the moment.

Not sure why with that, it’s just probably not in my pattern these days. I do have that touch of Autism / ADHDness in me, which manifests itself in various ways. I like listening to the music a lot, which is rather incompatible with watching stuff on the telly. Some days, especially lately, the telly has stayed off so it’s not been another source of input that contributes to the burn out. The desktop monitor is where I watch stuff like the World Endurance Championship racing, IMSA racing and Formula 1, although I’m a one screen person so that’s exclusive of any gaming I’m thinking of doing … it’s also where a favoured stream will get watched.

Talking of gaming … there’s a curious feeling of thinking I’m being driven towards playing certain games in particular due to time limited events in the game. There are a couple of those at the moment :

Euro Truck Sim 2 is running an event for the latest Greece expansion, with a World of Trucks (you can see the link to my trucker on the links list). The event runs until 2nd Feb but I’ve actually crashed through it yesterday and today.

Picture. We're looking towards the sun, in the clouds above our truck. In the background, a domed building with two very thin pointed towers.

How was Greece ? Honestly, not great. The expansion has carried through the character of it being a very pretty place with its own distinct architecture. But … I think it’s been rushed through and the NPC driver AI can’t handle things like the Greece specific toll booths. Event’s complete now though, so I’ll go back to my newer* character and not see the Greek areas for quite some time probably.

*I reset my character down to zero when I started the game again, without any of the extra map packs. There are a series of achievements that are far quicker and easier to get if you have less of a map, like the one to explore 60% of the map and there’s another for exploring 100% of the map.

There’s another event going at the moment, to deliver Xmas packages from the Winter Wonderland area I mentioned previously. I’ll complete that in the next session in the game I do. I only need to do 7 more runs to complete the number I need to do.

One for considerably more grinding is in Elite Dangerous … I haven’t been in this one nearly as much as I used to be. Once I completed the latest exploration mission, I wasn’t seeing much else I was interested in with the game. However, with the incoming addition of colonisation to the game, that definitely has my attention. I’ll definitely have to find a star system I can turn into a Dwagon Roost.

That’s one for later though, the near term grind in Elite is going to be for better hyperdrives. I missed seeing info about a Community Goal where you could get hold of the latest best for free, so I’ll need to do some collecting there.

But I was feeling trucks far more than space this weekend, so trucks it was.

Thinking about it, there will be timed seasonal events going in World of Warcraft at the moment … I’ll have to go back to that game at some point. I went away from it when Star Wars Outlaws came out and lost myself in the world of Kay Vess and Nix. I’m probably about to rebuy Outlaws and lose myself in its world again.

Or Rogue Trader, a computer roleplaying game set in the far future of Warhammer 40,000. That has a soundtrack too … (I haven’t acquired that yet because I seem to bounce off that kind of game lately)

Ahhh, time to peek at the sales again and hover over adding Rogue Trader and Outlaws to the cart. I have the start of a Cunning Plan for the arrangements of things over the next week, which I think will work. But I think I need to hide away again from the why of those arrangements (it’s not for here) so …

Signing off again for tonight ! See you all tomorrow. Have a lovely rest of your day.

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Advent Day 18 and U need better internet

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December 18, 2024

10:57 pm

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games

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Hello everyone,

Short one again today kinda out of necessity because my internet is giving some problems ! Sometimes it seems like my internet can’t handle cold weather and … yep it’s on the RCS Partial Service and SYNC Timing Synchronisation failure warnings again, which means I’m running both laptop and desktop off the mobile phone hotspot and there’s a stream running on the laptop.

Before I ramble too much, what’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at our advent scene again and the collection of models has been joined by a small spacecraft on top of the big d20. The spacecraft is white, with yellow and blue trim. The main part is aft, with two long wings going directly forwards making a U shape. 2 pairs of engines are at the back.

There we are, it’s a U Wing transport spacecraft from the excellent Rogue One movie. It could actually be the best Star Wars movie for me. It just made sense from start to finish, it avoided a lot of the mysticism of the Force which is literally handwavium. You could identify with all of the characters and they were acted so completely brilliantly.

Gonna have to watch it again soon. If you haven’t seen it for any reason, I’d thoroughly recommend finding a way to see it. It transcends itself past the source material.

Situation I mentioned yesterday – I don’t have any updates yet, which I’m taking as a good or at least neutral sign. I’m still feeling very broken mentally and physically at the moment but my concern is without rather than within. I’ll be ok although I do need rest, which is why that concern is pointing outwards rather than inwards.

Other stuff …

I’ll upgrade the mobile phone over the break. I can’t trust it any more, I’ll occasionally open it to find that some of the settings have gone weird. Like a Google authentication text disabling the notifications on incoming text messages, so I didn’t see some important info until I looked in the text messages area (by incidental look). It has some other quirks as well that may be interfering with normal operation.

It’s a Pixel 4 from 5 years ago, it’s done pretty well and it was a great move to go to it from a Samsung Galaxy 7 which was absolutely riddled with malware and intrusionware from Samsung. I believe they toned that down after the Galaxy S7 but I’ve got no reason to go outside Pixel, so I’ll replace the Pixel 4 with a Pixel 9.

Like, it’s doing well at the moment by hotspotting for both laptop and desktop and providing an active local area network link between the two. But I’m not going to push it too much by pulling cruise pictures over from the laptop today.

I’ll hold off for now on the desktop PC upgrade. Part to ease out the spending a little bit, part so I can see what happens with the graphics card market next month. I may well go for the option of doing a core (Processor, memory, case, mainboard) upgrade to go to Windows 11, while keeping the current 3060Ti graphics card. It’s still pretty good for power moving the pixels around the screen.

About that …

Picture. We're looking at a mostly green background poster thing showing how much I've been playing games this year. The title is "Sleepydwagonman's steam replay 2024". There is a big 34 games played above panels showing 393 achievements, 795 sessions and 18 new games. 5 panels below show my most played games.

I think that shows that when I start gaming, it’ll be long sessions. Someone on a discord is showing 1600 sessions, so they must be swapping between games a lot. I suppose each Skyrim session shows up as well and those can be only about a minute if I’m messing about with my set of mods.

I left out what the games were in the alt-text, so here we go for them by play time :

80% Idle Champions – this is an idle game where you set it up and let it run in the background. It kinda has story links in it but the main aim is to complete the adventures and make all the numbers go up, with your adventurers steadily getting stronger and stronger. Not quite sure why I still play it to be honest, maybe a habit. This one has accounted for 194 of those 393 achievements.

11% in Little Big Workshop – I love this cute easy to play factory building game and can easily forget about the world for many hours by opening it in the evening and then realising that the sun is coming up. It’s also 80% off until the next daily reset, which I think is going to be the start of a Steam sale anyway … so it’ll probably go off discount straight back on discount.

Motorsport Manager comes in at 4% of time played – this is a racing team simulator game, where you set the strategy and watch your drivers attempt to go around the track faster than everyone else. I’m currently in another megacampaign which has reached the late 2050s. This game caught me when it came out because it did everything so, so right … and gave believable races. Whereas I just bounced off the recent F1 Manager series, maybe they’ll get those right by the end of that contract.

Euro Truck Simulator has had a late revival with about 1% – I came back into this one in October. It’s another easy to play game where I’ll pick a route to go down and just attempt to chill while going from place to place. It has the progression factor that I look for, in that as I get money in the game, I can add more trucks to the company empire. I think I’m back to 15 now since restarting.

Last up for Steam is Aliens Dark Descent at 1% again – this is a real time strategy type game, set on a planet in the Alien universe. Big scary monsters are out to turn everyone into more big scary monsters but you’ve also got to contend with cultists and corporates. It’s a great game for the mechanics it introduced and the tension it builds. It does have bugs … but it’s another one that I enjoyed finishing. Apparently in just under 60 hours.

And that’s it for Steam – honourable mentions go to American Truck Simulator, the 2 Deus Ex games (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided), Cobalt Core was a fun find, Rover Mechanic Simulator is a nice little take stuff apart, fix stuff game. Dredge is in there with a bit of time spent on the latest DLC expansion and I’ll keep dipping into and out of the old Battletech game.

There’s more about the Steam Stuff at the link.

Outside of Steam, I did go back into World of Warcraft for a while … although I think I may have broken that addiction again and should probably either go back in again or cancel the subscription.

Then there’s also Elite Dangerous, which I did enjoy dipping back into again earlier this month. Warcraft and Elite aren’t launched via Steam for me, so the hours don’t add up there.

And the highlight for me of this year was Star Wars Outlaws. It has been criticised for bugs, which I only saw a couple of. It was a delight being immersed in the Star Wars universe doing shenanigans with the main character and companion. It was a weird feeling not really wanting to run it through to the finish of the story because I wanted to keep playing … but I was on a time limit due to not wanting to pay the asking price, with me playing it on the monthly subscription.

And that’s it for me for today ! Have a lovely evening everyone. Be well, hope you and yours are doing ok.

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Advent day 7 and it’s a … box ?

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December 7, 2024

9:07 pm

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Hello everyone, what’s behind day 7’s door ?

Picture. Our advent scene now has the addition of a cylindrical object with green and red dots. It's sitting on top of a green 20 sided dice.

Apparently it’s a minikit from the Lego Star Wars games, something you break to get game currency.

Because today’s model has come from a game, I thought I’d talk about games I’ve been playing recently today. First up …

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're looking at a sunset scene, where our truck in the lower left is going past an embankment to the right. On the embankment, glowing purple bushes ...

That’s taken from Euro Truck Simulator 2. I’ve been enjoying being back in the Truck Games. Something about the set up of taking a delivery mission from a huge choice (I usually pick the one paying the most £/mile) and then going from place to place appeals to me. Opening a bit more of the map and getting money to expand the truck collection gives me a bit of progress from each session.

Don’t know what’s happening with the bushes there, I think a recent mod has broken some textures or a mod needs to catch up. I think it’s kinda amusing when that happens, there’s no impact on gameplay and I’ve been watching the expansion of our new alien overlord purple glowing bushes.

Game screenshot. Cobalt Core. We're looking at two spaceships in the middle, facing each other. Our crew is shown in three portraits to the left, with the enemy portrait top right. A row of different playing cards is below and there is assorted other buttons.

That’s from Cobalt Core, which I first saw DistractedElf playing a little while ago. It’s a Roguelike game, structured around a timeloop mechanic where it takes about an hour for each run. It’s a good one to dip in and out of. Each battle is done with cards, this particular ship uses the Jupiter’s Moons to shoot the enemy. Each ship takes turns shooting the other and hopefully we can demolish the enemy before they demolish us.

I’ve been enjoying this one, it’s a fun little diversion to dip into and out of. Talking of spaceships …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at an orange rocky planetary surface, with the rust coloured buildings of a base scattered in front of us. In front and low on screen is our ship, it's blue at the back with engines on outriggers to left and right. There is a gold stripe in the middle and the front is white.

I had another little dip into Elite Dangerous again, with fleet flagship Tiamat’s Chariot coming out of the hangar for a new paint job and some trading. I haven’t been interested in the recent Thargoid arc at all but they’re showing info at the moment about a planet colonisation expansion coming soon and … that’s got my attention.

It was a good little session going from station to station taking goods from place to place.

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking down at a factory separated into various rooms, with little people with bobble hats at work stations. On the right, a list of items being assembled. In the centre, a jolly fellow with a santa hat is telling us we did a really good job getting things together for Xmas.

I may have slid into doing another Little Big Workshop run again. I really love this game, it’s an easy to play chilled out factory builder where you buy workstations for your adorable idiot little minions to use to put together various items that you sell for profit. (They have issues with sticking to tasks, hence affectionately calling them “idiot”).

I’ve been playing and enjoying Little Big Workshop for a huge number of hours (1538!) because it’s just so easy to play and it’s also very addictive. I set myself up for challenge runs now to see how quickly I can get them to finish all of the objectives.

Game screenshot. Motorsport Manager. We're looking at the livery design screen and a purple, black and pink sports car.

Of course there’s been a bit of Motorsport Manager in there. This one is another that I can pretty watch play and occasionally intervene. A dinner time game ! I’m in the midst of another very long campaign here. I’ve won the championships with the endurance car, the GT car and the single seater cars and am now in a second single seater racing team, building that one up so it beats the rest of the competition again.

I think I might have a pattern there … I’ll attach to games that I get really, really good at and then not play anything else. I guess there’s a bit of enjoying the games with that too, is that what really counts there ? Variation is good though.

Last one of this set … I rebought Deus Ex Human Revolution last month. This is probably the number 1 first person shooter story style game for me. It doesn’t do everything another game would do … but what it does, it does extremely well with super tight gameplay. And the story is pretty decent too.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Human Revolution. We're looking out over an industrial city scape at night towards a parking area with wire fencing. There are various concrete blocks to hide behind and a mission marker to the left.

I may have completed all of its achievements in just one single run. I’ll be back for Deus Ex Mankind Divided (the sequel) at some point, I like to space them out to in part reflect there being 2 years game timeline between the two games.

They’re a cracking pair of near future games, where augmentation technology is becoming a big part of life. Definitely worth a look and the games are practically given away at sales time. Like the Mass Effect set !

I dropped a screenshot of Mass Effect Legendary edition the other day so I’ll hold off on doing that again now. These are games from a good few hundred years ahead, first person shooter style games driven by story. Perhaps a controversial one saying that I prefer the Deus Ex games ?

I think that’s it for me for tonight. Oh ! We survived the storms ok ! My bin stayed up too (or was propped up again by CK on his way to/from shops, cheers CK).

Have a lovely evening everyone.

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Day 3 ! One for the pew pew

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December 3, 2024

9:47 pm

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Hello everyone, what’s behind door number 3 ?

Picture. We're looking at the snow scene, with red dwagon to the left, Leia figure rear right and the XWing is behind a starfighter with two black hexagonal wings either side of a little pod in the centre.

I think I have a little behind the scenes stuff to catch up on here :-D. I’m seeing a “Generate with AI” button on the picture uploads, which I will never use and kinda object to the WordPress mod people adding there ! Oh dear, just started and we’re massively tangenting already. Only one thing to do there … grab that tangent and dive right on in !

Tangent 1 – AI generated pictures … I won’t call them art because I don’t consider it art in the same way as someone putting their soul into what they make is art. But I have seen some wonderful pictures where people take a number of objects and a theme and weave them together into something that looks absolutely stunning. That’s a bit different from people just putting “a fierce dragon with a sword in a fantasy setting” into a picture generator and getting something out that looks almost identical to something Askren (aka Exploding Dice) has taken days to make and was paid to create.

(Askren is a good egg, check him out, that’s the Twixxer link above which probably won’t last that much longer).

Tangent 2 ! Social media. I’ve been struggling to keep up with these lately. I’ll monitor Instagram closely because I have that tightly curated down to only show me a small number of selected individuals who post content on there that makes me happy. I’ve been enjoying the general vibe on Bluesky, the artist and author community there is fun to keep up with. Twixxer is dying a death due to the policies being introduced to it and … Farcebook is algorithm driven and doesn’t let you keep up with people without spam being introduced.

The main thing there is … social media can be very overwhelming. It can be a bit too much trying to keep up with it all. It’s ok if you need to withdraw from it and go a bit lower profile on it. Look after yourselves. If it’s getting too much, consider dropping the follows of people who don’t bring you joy or otherwise reduce how much you feel obliged to keep up with it all.

Picture. Star Trek Meme. We're looking at two men in overalls, red at the top, black lower down with black shoulder areas. The bald one on the left says "I've never written a trigonometry paper", then "But I cosigned a few". The black haired fellow on the right is now holding his head in his hand.

I’m mostly going to be doing fairly random posts throughout advent (including tangents when they hit) but also maybe getting led by the day’s model … It’s a TIE Fighter today, which is taking me back (way back) to the first space fighter game that had me addicted on PC. It’s TIE Fighter from the days of the 486 based machine. Yep. Last century. TIE Fighter was a really, really good game in its time. Excellent graphics and a tight, responsive flight model. There was a decent story running through as well, TIEing all of the missions together.

Game screenshot. Tie Fighter. We're looking out of an octagonal window into space, from a small fighter ship. The lower part of obscured by a target display showing a boxy shuttle. Top left and top right are a couple of circles with dots showing what is around us.

I went to the X Wing game a little later, I actually enjoyed TIE Fighter more. The missions were difficult but I managed to complete them all. Whereas some of the missions in XWing got me stuck and I couldn’t get past them.

Fast forward a whole heap of years and we get to …

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. Our character is in the foreground wearing blue jacket and faded brown trousers. In the background, a boxy grey white spaceship pointing left with engines to the right. It's a day scene with hazy clouds in the sky.

That’s from Star Wars Outlaws and has our player character, Kay Vess, looking at a spaceship called the Trailblazer. I really enjoyed this game. I’d effectively rented it from the publisher because … it’s really expensive. I can easily afford the asking price to buy it (£95 for the version with a season pass for expansions), I just don’t want to pay that much for a game. I did massively enjoy it though and will happily play it again when the discounts are low enough. 25% (current Steam sale) is a decent start at a discount but …. I got other games to play first before going back to Outlaws.

It was a lot of fun though and I did love feeling immersed in the world that the developers created for us. They gave us something special here. That’s my honest opinion there, lots of other opinions are out there about this one. If you’re deciding whether to play it, please go by the opinions of people who have actually played it, not the ones who see : female protagonist, Star Wars not what they would have done and all of the other weird prejudices people get.

I think I might be getting a bit too excited there and it’s telling in how my shoulder is behaving :-D. (It’s a little sore and is making my right hand start to be numb again).

I better leave it there, maybe another epic screenshot ?

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. We're on a desert planet, looking at sandy blocky buildings in the background with mountains behind there. In the foreground, our Kay Vess and lined up behind her are 2 speeder cars and 3 speeder bikes.

That’s from the Mos Eisley space port, first seen in the original movie. I loved seeing the little Easter Eggs that they seeded through the game, including this line up of the various speeders from the various movies.

Also oh look, just under a day to go on the Steam sale. I have the following in the cart and should really buy :

Mass Effect Legendary edition – I enjoyed going back to Deus Ex Human Revolution again and playing this fresh. So the Mass Effect games at 92% off (£3.99) have the attention.

Slipways and soundtrack – a somewhat speculative one at 50% off (£8.08). This one is a space strategy game.

Tank Mechanic Simulator – ok, a weird one but I did enjoy Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. This one is 76% off for £3.71.

Tavern Master’s Pirate Cove DLC – no discount, this one is £4.29 and I did enjoy building a legendary tavern in the original game which looks like its lost its discount early.

Ok, that’s it for me for tonight, enjoy the rest of your evening, see you tomorrow. I’m going to be concentrating on enjoying the rest of Billietrixx’s Twitch (with link) stream, Tessachka (linky) is on the laptop and there’s a Mike Oldfield album playing in the background.

Nite all 🙂

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A year in (Steam) games

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December 18, 2023

10:15 pm

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Hello everyone,

There’s been a couple of year recap things come out lately, the one from today is from the Steam games store showing what I’ve been up to this year. I figured, hey, let’s share this one.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a non plussed looking black dog with a grey muzzle looking to the right. The dog is wearing a flat cap. The captions are "When I was a pup" and "I had one toy and it was a stick"

Games have come a fair way since the early days. The days (hushed voice) of 8 bit microcomputers. I started my gaming on a BBC Micro. Yep, last century, I am old. Oh ! I even did a meme for that a little while ago.

Picture. Cartoon meme. There are 4 panels with a pink figure on a bed talking to a blue figure with a lab coat and glasses. The captions go "Doc, I feel like I'm getting old" "Hmmm, tell me, did you play Elite when it first came out?" "Yeah, I played it as a kid". Last panel, the Doc writes "Patient is basically dead"

Yep. That fits. Elite Dangerous doesn’t appear in the list because I play it through the Frontier launcher but it would have a position high up here as well. I had a peek at a port of Frontier Elite 2 from 1993 too, might go back to that. What’s Steam say about me ? Here we are :

Picture. We're looking at a panel with my gaming statistics for 2023. It says 33 games played, 306 achievements, 787 sessions, 16 new games. My most played games are shown with their store pictures and they are Idle Champions, Little Big Workshop, Motorsport Manager, One Military Camp and Trans Road USA.

There’s a bit more detail on the Steam page itself. The stats are heavily dominated by Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, which is an idler game that you just set up and it runs itself. So that’ll be running on the machine for many hours at a stretch and it’ll be running in the background of other games too. (For some of the stats, the game has to be running). A good few of those sessions will be from troubleshooting mods for games like Skyrim, where the game is launched, has a crash, the mods are tweaked and we try again. The others in that panel are :

Little Big Workshop – it’s a cute factory game where your little gnomeployees will set about building toys with the workshop tools you provide for them. It’s a lovely little game and I’d thoroughly recommend it. It’s a game I keep going back to.

Motorsport Manager – should really have had its time by now with the release of the frankly not good enough F1 Manager games but I still keep going back to this one. It’s a low interaction game, so I can do a race with the tactics and stuff while I’m munching my dinner.

One Military Camp – this one came out this year and it’s a fun little camp building thing, where you manage the one military camp to survive an invasion. It’s your job to set up the army to push back the evil dictator guy.

Trans Road USA – hmm, an ok game, probably not one I’d recommend. It has nice mechanics for setting up the trucking company but the campaign mode gets very silly. Still, I got my value out of it and it kept me amused for a long time.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a dark area of space, lit by scattered stars. Our ship is lower left in the foreground. It's facing away, pointing upwards. We can see engines on outriggers to the left and right, the hull is lit by lines of red. Top left is a small dark moon. Top right is a ball of a space station, with a ringed section behind.

Like the space trucking game. That one’s from Elite Dangerous, which I have connected to Steam but I just play it through the separate Frontier launcher.

My games seem to have gone more recent than the average, with 70% of them being released in the last 1 to 7 years. The average of that is 52%. Forgetting Idle Champs, the most played style is Management Games, i.e. games where I can mostly sit back and watch and occasionally intervene. 146 of the 306 achievements were from Idle Champions.

Highlights of the year were :

Dredge – a charming little game where you’re a ship captain of a little fishing boat. I’ve mentioned this one before. If you like the spooky vibes from the trailer, it’s definitely worth a look. I enjoyed it.

Skyrim – for the endless variety of mods you can add to it. Plus I like the vibe of being able to set out in a direction and find something new. I still need to finish it.

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided – the pair of Adam Jensen games that leaves everyone who plays them pining for a sequel to finish off the trilogy. They’re set in the grim near future, where cyborg augmentations are being added to our bodies. They’re a good pair of shooter stealth story type games, maybe ageing now but good story games don’t really lose their appeal. I’ll mention another of these in a bit.

Battletech – oh there’s one. Harebrained Schemes (the devs) did a great job with this one and I keep going back to it.

Mars Horizon – was one I played to death and I’ll keep occasionally going back to it. It puts you in charge of a space agency. The sequel due in 2024 will hopefully be a great game.

Old classics – Stellaris and Knights of the Old Republic. I feel these games have aged badly. Kotor was an early game of its type, newer games have made a lot of improvements. Stellaris started great but it lost me along the way with too many patches and gameplay changes. Master of Magic had a good remake but I think it’s stuck too much in the past. I miss the old wizard avatars too.

Fun but I’ve finished with them – Tavern Master, nice little pub builder but I’ve seen all it has. Euro Truck Sim 2 and American Truck Sim, I did enjoy taking the loads to the varied places but … it was hurting my hands to play it. Airport CEO is one where I’ve seen all it has again.

Promising but could be much better – Farm Manager 2021, I got annoyed by the restrictions of a seemingly endless campaign. Pegasus Expedition, this story based strategy game has an interesting take on space Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate but the mechanics let it down. I might go back to it. Final Upgrade, a factory builder but … was finding it a bit tedious.

Mechanic games – Rover Mechanic Simulator is an occasional pleasure where you take Mars rovers apart and fix them. Offroad Mechanic Simulator is a successor to the car mechanic sim games.

Game screenshot. Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. We're looking at the concrete outside a garage with the road in the distance. The foreground has a sleek purple open top car with lots of chrome trim. The background has a bright green little pick up truck.

What’s left ? Lots !

Games I bounced off but need to give more of a chance to : Solasta, a table top style role playing game. Just can’t get into these. Cyberpunk 2077, a future shooter role player. Mount and Blade II Bannerlord is another new one for me. Sky Haven is an airport manager builder game that I tried the other week but Brain said NOPE. Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries is like Battletech with the big war robots but this one puts you in the pilot seat. Dorf Romantik and Rogue Tower are both fun little additions.

Stuff I completely and totally bounced off : Ticket to Ride, would be a fun board game with friends, very meh solo. War for the Overworld, Game Dev Tycoon, Two Point Campus (on a free trial).

And that’s them all ! Highlight of the year is definitely Dredge.

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking towards a deserted looking island with pine trees and huts. In the foreground, a shaggy skinny looking orange furred dog which is looking our way. The options to the right are "Pet the Dog" and "Leave". We of course made the following caption happen "You reach out and gently pat the dog. Its eyes follow your hand, and it seems to understand you're not a threat."
YOU CAN PET THE DOG

Quest of the year, game of the year. (Haven’t bought Baldur’s Gate 3 yet)

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into my gaming life for 2023. Back to cruising next post probably 😀

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Technical Difficulties May Delay Cruise

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September 11, 2023

11:02 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a curious few weeks since I posted last time. (I do like that word, “curious”, it covers a lot of meanings.) I’m on leave for a week now, it’s been delayed a little bit by me doing Work Stuff but I’m in chill out mode at the moment.

Cartoon picture, credit to "Regan". We're looking at two dinosaurs sitting on a rock jutting out of a rising ocean, there is the top of a tree to the left. In the background, a ship with pairs of animals on board. The caption "Oh crap! Was that TODAY?"

Yep. Could have been on a cruise this week. The why not is because I’ve been dealing with another flare up with my outsides again. The pattern there seems to be about a week of slow healing followed by a day where it’ll suddenly reset back to the start of that again. I think it’s steadily improving but I’m not wanting to be too far away from the gunk I’m using to medicate it at the moment. Including an overnight away for work last week … It was threatening again on that.

How come it’s bad ? To be honest, not sure. I think I’m reacting to something I’ve been eating again but I can’t localise what it could be. Outside of maybe something garlic related. I know, weird thought. But I did get a reset this weekend after garlic butter infused bread with my dinner on Thursday and pizza garlic bread on Saturday. Need more data.

After living with this condition for over 10 years now, it’s something I have to keep a very close eye on. The psychologically damaging thought is “will it ever get better ?” And that thought does keep running through my mind. That’s partially answered by “It has got a lot better” because I can somewhat remember what it was like over 5 years ago when it was at its worst. I’m not going to go into too much details but one curiosity is that a large amount of my legs is smooth now, hairless. The hair didn’t come back.

Try not to think too deeply about that !

I do need to get myself out of the house for a decent amount of time though. I really need a good holiday I think, not just one spent being lazy in the house.

Picture. Meme. A cute little mostly white with black patches is sitting up on a tiny boat floating on calm water. The scene is just lit by the moon. The caption is "When you're just a cute dog on a boat, looking for a tennis ball"

There were a couple of cruise options I’ve been looking at. The main criteria are : not too far away, not hot, good places. I did enjoy the flying trips in and out of Norway and would like to see more. So … Option 1 :

Picture. We're looking at a map of the coast of Norway. There is a thin black line, joined with many red dots. It's the route of a cruise ship from Bergen in the South, to Kirkenes in the North.

That’s from Hurtigruten cruises (link) although I found that one from one of the cruise search sites. This looks like a very interesting cruise, especially in the shorter one way trip. Must research it a lot more to see if it could be made to work. The problem, is getting to or from Kirkenes in the North. You can fly there … from Oslo. So the travel around the cruise would be Gatwick to Bergen, then on the way back it would be Kirkenes to Oslo to Heathrow. I couldn’t see how I’d make that work. The there and back option would work a lot better.

Picture. We're looking at a map of Northern Europe. It's zoomed in a lot, showing just southern Norway and Sweden, Denmark, the top of Germany and a slice of the UK to the left. There's another route marked for the ship journey.

That’s another, much easier option going from Copenhagen to Molde Fjord and then back again with a side hop to Kiel in Germany. I think the flights worked out to going from Heathrow to Copenhagen, which makes it far easier for things like where do you leave the car. It’s a little awkward getting across from Gatwick to Heathrow, especially after being tired for travel. Better just to pile into the car and then use the remaining energy to cruise back down a hopefully quiet motorway.

Anyway, cruise didn’t happen this time because I was a bit too concerned about going away from home for an extended period where I wouldn’t be able to pop the medication to attack this ongoing skin condition.

Another option is a narrowboat cruise in the UK. This would be really valuable for informing the choices about the off in the future plan to get out of here and live on a boat. But I think I’d need to have a friend along for a narrowboat cruise for a) company and b) assistance with the locks and tying up the boat.

What’s these technical difficulties from the title ? I’ve had a look at another new game …

Picture. Meme. We're looking at an otter, swimming underwater. He's gripping a pair of water pipes quite tightly. The caption is "he needs those parts for his space ship, he's going to otter space"
It’s an older meme but it still checks out

The game I’ve been trying out is the brand new just released Starfield. I’ve been enjoying half watching a series of streams on it and it’s been intriguing up to what I’ve seen on it. I’d quite like to lose myself in it but … and this is a big but. It’s not unplayable when not installed on an SSD but the play experience definitely suffers to the point where I don’t want to open it again until I’ve migrated my system across to a bigger and better SSD.

Jargon buster – SSD is a Solid State Device storage thing. Whereas the older Hard Discs worked by having spinning discs with material that stored what was saved to them, Solid State Devices do that with electronic memory devices instead. Hard Discs take a lot of time to find what’s needed, SSDs just zap over to the data. They’re much faster in both finding stuff and retrieving stuff. But they were also subject to a massive premium on price, such that when Meltdown was built, it got a big for the time 500GB drive. I’ve now acquired a faster 2TB drive, I just need to install it.

The technical difficulties is definitely a TLDR. Basically, I have two suitable slots in my machine but one of them isn’t working. I think I know why … but available mental effort isn’t wanting to fix it that way. I’m having to ration that a bit at the moment. Anyway, instead of trying to make the dodgy slot work, I’m just going to acquire another slot. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, Starfield ?

Game screenshot. Starfield. We're looking at the side of a spaceship with all sorts of protrusions coming out of the sides. An orange planet is above us, half in shadow.
I did a space

It’s an intriguing game so far. It’s been heavily described as Skyrim in Space, which is a blessing and a curse. Skyrim was such a successful game with a go anywhere, do anything format. Translating that formula across to space makes for a very promising game from my point of view. Curse ? It looks like it’s inherited some of the user interface awkwardness from vanilla Skyrim. But … this is a Bethesda game, there are already mods out there to improve the user interface.

Game screenshot. Starfield. Our pilot is standing in front of a futuristic city. She's of medium skin tone, with faint blue hints in tied back hair. She's wearing a dark grey jumpsuit. In the background is a selection of people, standing around having a chat.
I did a ground

The thing I noticed a bit later there is the group of non player characters in the background. They’re all in different but lifelike poses. I walked past a different scripted conversation on my way out of the spaceport too. It’s a nice touch, whereas less technically complex games will quite happily do limited, unnatural poses, it looks like there’s more life in the background this time.

It’s a little thing but it’s tickled the geek in me.

Either way, I’m quite looking forward to going back into Starfield, hopefully I’ll be all up and running with the PC upgrade soon.

Time to sign off though – Hoping to enjoy a quiet week off work, it’s been a while coming. No sea cruise this time, I’ll keep that for later.

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