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Techie Space

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October 25, 2022

11:00 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while again. I think that might be partly down to burn out that I realised might have been going on for perhaps 2 and a half years now. It’s an insidious thing, burn out, you know something’s going on because your patterns change but it tends to creep in and make those changes to your behaviours without you realising.

So for me, it probably started at the beginning of the covid period and there were a few work things that really brought it out. Yep, even more than the extreme skin condition that I had for too many years before that. Perhaps that just wore down the reserves so that the anxiety of the first lockdown periods (and probable covid around March to June 2020) coupled with the work stuff activated the burn out. One symptom may actually have been the creation of this blog, as a knock on to getting annoyed with how Google/Blogger were changing how you use that system. I think that’s been a positive change overall though as it’s let me learn a few things that I took for granted with Blogger. Oh wait ! Caption.

Meme picture. A contented looking sleeping cat is resting underneath blankets. The captions are "I can't get out of bed..." "These blankets have accepted me as one of their own and if I leave now I might lose their trust."
Trust in the blankets

I’m off work this week, it felt like I’d been running backwards and went straight into a wall. Some of that is increasing anxiety about things I should be getting sorted out but don’t have the energy to attempt to start. Which is its own feedback loop as well. Because the job isn’t started, the anxiety increases. I need to look into other ways of getting that sorted out.

What has been going on ? Been doing space again …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a small trapezoid shaped spacecraft on a landing pad. It is green on the outside with a yellow circle in the centre. The circle has a demonic grin and eyes in black.
Tea 89 is after your Tea

That’s my old Cobra Mk3 again from Elite Dangerous, with one of the free paint packs from the latest drops campaign. Good seasonal paint job although I think when Tea 89 comes out again, I’ll put it back to the orange and white livery. There wasn’t a special paint job for Tiamat’s Chariot :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a star filled area of space. To the lower left, we see our spaceship with purple flame coming from a series of engines. The ship is mostly hidden in silhouette with a small sun in the centre. There is a planet in dark eclipse to the right, we can see the city lights.
A trading we will go

There’s actually a bit of unfinished business there with a Community Goal in progress. With today’s activities, I haven’t had a chance to drop off the cargo I collected on the weekend. Oh and I had a look at another space game too :

Game screenshot. Eve Online. We're looking at a starfield with cloudy backdrops. There are user interface features to the right, a ship status display at bottom centre and our little ship is in the middle of the screen.
Humble beginnings

It was good to have another look at Eve Online. It’s a persistent online universe space game, where you fly with I think it’s 10,000 other pilots. The large battles can have 1000’s of players on multiple sides with everything from little tackle frigates to titan super capital ships. Around that, there are epic battles for territory and industrialists supplying the ships to fuel those battles. Everything in the game is player built or supplied. Oh and the game is (in)famous for its espionage as well.

I got curious so I installed the game again but it’s one game I’m going to have to stay well clear on lest I do get drawn into it. Too many games, not enough time and Eve has heavy expectations on player time.

I’ve also completed the achievements on Little Big Workshop. Indeed, this might be another sign of the burn out. While I’ve dived into games like LBW, I’ve been very wary about going back into games like Elite which take a bit more energy and effort to play.

But … there is a new toy here that has taken a fair bit of mental effort today …

Meme picture. A cat is sitting on a laptop computer. They're both on a table with chairs tucked in. The caption is "To unlock your computer turn on the electric can opener"
But ! There is still food in the bowl

I splurged on a laptop … The motivating factor was with me traveling more for work, the old laptop is a bit too chonky. It’s a 2.6kg lump, the new one is a 1.2kg light 14″ screen laptop. There were other motivations as well, the screen on the old laptop is pretty poor.

What didn’t I get – HP and Dell because their performance and reliability in the work laptops is nasty. The work Dell I have now struggles to interface with the screens. It’ll sometimes refuse to connect to a screen when it’s plugged back in and suffers from worrying graphical corruption if that interface is stretched a little. I avoided getting another Asus due to the screen quality of the last one, plus I think they charge for the name as well as the equipment. Lenovo … weren’t offering the spec I wanted plus I didn’t get good vibes.

So I went with Acer again, the family has had a string of these machines and they’ve all done really well for us up to the point where they ran out of capability due to the software moving on. (Disclosure note – I bought and paid for laptop 100% although they do run fairly substantial discounts on the Acer website).

Today’s activity has been figuring out the differences with Windows 11 and starting to get everything copied over. I got worried early on because the laptop was showing signs of being unresponsive due to hardware issues but those went away as soon as I switched wifi. (Oh and after ripping Norton out). So I have the old laptop, new laptop and desktop talking to each other over the network now. It connects to the various bluetooth devices ok too.

iTunes is being more of an issue, because I’m having to authorise the computer and copy the library via Homeshare in iTunes 12 before I downgrade that back to the usable iTunes 10.7. I’ll have to look at that issue again because the Apple ecosystem isn’t sustainable there. I use iTunes 10.7 for the DJ feature, which is the only way I listen to music on it. The issue with switching laptop is that 10.7 isn’t allowed to sign in to Apple store stuff now which means alternate means required for copying the library over. Only 7000 more tracks to go (it’ll be running overnight).

Another issue I’ll be looking to sort is the sound again. Windows and laptops (especially Realtek hardware) seem to really suffer for loudness, although that might be down to me having them fight for dominance among music, stream and desktop. But Chrome does always feel quieter than the audio test and the levels from Chrome never seem particularly high. I’ll be looking into this more. One really happy thing is that Chrome has pulled my settings and tabs across from old laptop to new laptop, although the various cookies needed to be set up again.

What I do need to do is get myself out of the house. Maybe Thursday ? I think tomorrow will involve attempting to get better sleep tonight (it’s been at a premium lately) and then doing the Elite Community Goal stuff tomorrow afternoon. But I do need to get out and about because being in the house too much isn’t particularly healthy.

So … am suffering with the burn out, not really seeing an end to that at the moment but I’ll keep monitoring and attempting to look after myself better than I have been doing. The last couple of months feel like they’ve been rough too, with me going from a tummy issue on the away trip, into ginger poisoning, into probable covid again and then physical issues with a cramp tear in my leg and the shoulder coming out again.

And in the meantime, people seem to think I’m doing all right with the work now which helps a lot. The last post descended into feeling utterly devalued due to a management chain that went pretty weird. I’ve been doing better since getting out of that atmosphere.

And I’m looking forward to listening to all that music again with a fresh ear. That’s one thing proven, laptop can talk to hifi ! Hurrah. And the physical issues were starting to relent at the end of last week. Just need a proper sleep pattern again now.

Sleep well everyone, be well. And there are only 6500 tracks to copy over now.

Addendum – I was having problems getting into the laptop BIOS to reverse the rather offensive reversed Function key behaviour (where F2 does airplane mode instead of F2). You’re supposed to press F2 or something while the laptop is starting to be able to get in. This wasn’t working. However ! These people at Tenforums (link) have a very comprehensive and helpful answer. Sorted !

Lost in a Workshop

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October 5, 2022

10:49 pm

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Hello everyone,

Gosh it’s been a bit of time again since the last post. I may have gotten myself quietly addicted to another game. Also got bugs and other issues again because of course I did !

Picture. We're looking at a sleepy dragon, curled up with his head resting on his front paws.
Zzzz

May also be struggling for energy. I might have mentioned bugs already :-D. One reason I didn’t post was because I wanted to stay away from posting during the Queen’s mourning period. Which might seem a little odd ? Seemed right to me.

There’s a weird one there actually. I adopted a special tribute picture on Facebook and Twitter for the period. I usually echo my picture on to Discord as well but it didn’t feel safe to do so. That’s very weird, as the Discord communities are the “safe” place usually, Facebook and Twitter are definitely not. And I did get a couple of people attempting to engage with me on an incident in the cricket … They’re blocked now. No hesitation, just block the idiots who you don’t know who are trying to endanger your mental health. Curate your space, it might make it a bit of an echo chamber but you really, really have to look after your own mental health and that means not giving the idiots a chance to affect that.

What happened in the cricket ? It’s a complex one, around the practice of Mankadding. This is when a batter is repeatedly getting a head start in attempts to get a run down to the other end. If the fielding side has enough, they can run them out if the batter has gone marching off before the bowler has completed the delivery. Note, it’s really difficult to stop in your stride as a bowler. The stealing of a few yards is called backing up and it’s something players are coached to do.

I call it cheating.

At the time, it finished off a game that England had salvaged into what was turning into an incredibly tense finish. Bit of an anticlimax and it took the attention away from Jhulan Goswani’s (wiki link) final game. The various commentators were saying it was legal but against the spirit of the game and it polarised the cricketing world into Everyone objecting, India people saying “well it’s in the laws”. So’s certain forms of tax evasion and other bits of cheating.

And then we find out a couple of days later that the England player had been repeatedly warned and the umpires informed about what was about to happen. I was much relieved when I heard that. Mankadding without a warning is really poor behaviour. Warning the cheating player is how it should be done and then yeah, full support for what the fielding side did.

A certain England non-playing captain has come out and said he’d call a Mankadded batter back … this is the same player who I think has been run out in this way several times. Good on the fielding side for calling him on the cheating. I don’t think he should have been allowed to remain as captain of the England side after saying that. (Moeen Ali is a far better person to run that side)

I don’t really think the player is at fault. It’s the coaching. The backing up had become part of the game, with it being ingrained into the behaviour on the field. I didn’t do it, partly because I was fast enough that I didn’t need to.

Enough for that rant – go by the facts. If someone comes out with “but it’s within the rules of the game”, so is most of what happens in football and that game is a mess for cheating. It happens in rugby too and that game is a bit too heavy in its rules, the rules can bog down the game and make it difficult to watch.

Oh ! That wasn’t why the tribute picture didn’t go on Discord. It feels odd that I considered Twit/book safe for it but not Discord. The communities I’m still in on Discord are good but whereas people in them will be inclusive in certain ways, they are very critical in others. And I wasn’t comfortable with having a monarchy related picture on there, which says really bad things about those communities. If you’re going to say you’re inclusive, you have to respect everyone … and that’s not consistent.

Game ?

Game screenshot. F1 Manager 22. We're looking at a road going off into the distance. A fence is to the right, a row of garages are to the left. A set of timings of in a column to the left. A white and black racing car is coming towards us, heavily sparking.
This is fine

That’s from F1 Manager 22, which isn’t the game I’m quite addicted to at the moment. It looks stunning, probably with assistance coming from the F1 racing sim game. The pit garage people look appalling, some of the worst people models seen since before the last decade. They’re nasty and indicative of how lumpy in quality this game is.

On one hand, it offers a curious strategic management layer which I’d like to get in to more. And the races are surprisingly compelling.

On the other hand, the F1 licence aspects are a complete mess and a waste of what the game should be. They shackle it down in ways including extremely limited variation in the canned commentary (anything leads to “That’s a terrible blow for the team!” and it’s also shackled to the current 10 teams in F1. There are numerous bugs in the race gameplay, although some of these are being addressed.

It is still a quite compelling game though. Mind you, I’ve spent more time in the old Motorsport Manager than F1 Manager 22 over the last couple of weeks, having restarted with a new team in a non-F1 style of racing.

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking down at a tabletop, which has various objects on the edges like a coffee cup, pencils and glue. In the centre there's a cutaway view of a building with 5 rooms with machines and tiny people within.
A humble beginning

That’s Little Big Workshop and I got instantly addicted to it. It’s cute, has pretty good consistent gameplay and it’s one where you can set things up and watch them run. A chilled out kind of game play. And the factory steadily expands as you make more stuff, sell more stuff and can buy more machines. So by the end, I had this :

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking at a sky eye view of the factory. There are a bunch more rooms, filled with either machines or place to put materials to put in the machines.
Busy bees

That was in the run up to completing the achievements on the base game. It’s a curious, fun little game filled with cuteness. Even down to what you have your people put together, like the bongos, skateboards, pedal cars, cute robots and …

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking at a zoomed in view of one of the rooms which is a stock room. The room is filled with big two legged mechs sized for one of the little people to ride in.
Behold my Cat Mech Army

Yep. Built a lot of those. I really enjoyed my time in this one, definitely enough to buy the DLC for it when it went on discount last night. I’ll save that one for later. it did have an issue though …

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking down at the rooms and machines again but this time, there is graphical corruption in the form of lines and an overlay.
That doesn’t look right …

I’ve mostly sorted it now by reducing the graphics quality and applying some out of game options but I was having to restart it every few hours due to increasing graphical corruption mayhem. What’s in the picture above was pretty mild. It got to heavy headache inducing flickering and became unplayable until a restart. I think my hardware is ok because other games aren’t affected plus the temperatures were good and it opened back up ok on an immediate restart. But …

I’ve had bugs over the past week. I should get tested but don’t have testing kits. I’ve been picking up a smell I’ve been interpreting as burnt or melted solder …

So the 1+1= has been happening and making me wonder if the game is leading up to an expensive graphics card failure. Or whether it’s just a coincidence and I’ve interpreted it wrong.

Yep, bugged again with another cold like thing which hasn’t gone away yet. And that’s on top of being affected by ginger poisoning again. I think that was contaminated ice cream although it could have been something from the foreign trip a month ago. The ginger is out of my system now, phew !

Hopefully not as long again before the next post, there’s been enough in here for several I think. I’ve just been distracted by game and lacking energy again.

Stay safe everyone, be well !

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.