Cor, toasty out

Hello everyone,

We have that traditional British thing at the moment where it’s flipped over into a bit warmer than the average and we’re suddenly all declaring that we’re melting. It’s the houses …

Meme picture. A big golden coloured dog is lying on the floor, facing us. He's one of the dogs with big jowls that flow down from his mouth and very long ears. They are folded out over the carpet.
Toasty indeed

After a few intense feeling weeks through work to make things happen, I have a week off this week. First one since early April I think. (Can’t remember, must be sign that I needed it !) The work stuff all came to its conclusion last week and while I can’t say what it was, everything worked, we got our Thing done and it actually worked a bit better than I expected. Good times.

It was really toasty though. We were in places that aren’t really designed for the conditions and they’re getting a bit old now too, so not as much ventilation as would have been ideal. It was good to have the day out of the work from home office and see things working nicely.

What am I intending to do on this week off ? I need to do a decent amount of work around the house but am waiting for it to cool off a bit before I do that. I don’t do at all well in the heat so I need it to be a bit cooler. Our places are intended to retain the heat so it’s better in the winter. As an example, my graphics card thermometer is what I tend to go by. 40 degrees C is a nice temperature where I’ll start taking the jumper off. It’s reading 50 degrees C at the moment and my latest fan is saying that the place it’s at is 27 degrees C.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is facing away from camera, all engines firing. The right hand side of the image is all yellow orange sun, which reflects off our ship. There is a small dot in the upper part of the image, it is our enemy ...
Duelling by the sun

Not quite as hot as there. Mining in the Manic Minarr isn’t being too profitable at the moment, so this is me back in the fleet flagship, Tiamat’s Chariot, running cargo missions and turning the tables on wannabe pirates. It’s been good too, 2 kills gave 2.5m credits and some valuable salvage. It’s a nice supplement to trading legs which are about 4m to 8m profit at the moment.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is on the left in a mostly cream coloured tight fitting spacesuit with dirty yellow highlights. She has blue hair and is facing away from camera towards a small ship waiting on the landing pad. It has a mostly grey livery with blue patches and the word "APEX" in white.
Taxi !

I needed to wait for Tiamat’s Chariot to be delivered to where I was though, which meant taking a taxi ride to unlock one of the new engineers for planetary operations.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My character faces away towards a floodlit base. We see the entrance gate with a sign saying "Olowe's Workshop". We see buildings in the background, lit from inside. A thin red line of a targeting laser is going through our character.
I hope that isn’t a targeting laser

The place I randomly chose was a planetary base. I couldn’t get into most of it, didn’t have the clearances. But it was good to be out and about and looking around. Performance of the game has improved markedly since release but it’s still nowhere near what it should be. I’m getting perhaps 20 frames per second while walking around.

But I’m keeping the gaming time a bit lower for now. Pushing those pixels around makes the graphics card make heat and introducing heat into already warm rooms isn’t a good idea.

I do want to get out and about properly over this week. Like seeing something in the cinema again for the first time since Feb 2020. The offerings last year didn’t really appeal too much but there are more promising things at the moment like Godzilla vs Kong, Raya and the Last Dragon and I’d count A Quiet Place II if I’d seen the first one. Cardiff is looking like a potential place. Oh and that would mean a decent amount of time in an air conditioned car too :-).

Now that I have the reading glasses, I need to be getting back to the reading too. Reading makes no heat ! No heat is good.

I’m going to leave it there though before I dive into things like our country likely needing to put restrictions on movement back in again soon. We were doing well for a while with our case numbers going down but in the last week, they’ve started ticking up again. I was kinda surprised that crowds were allowed at the last Test Match plus I think crowded pictures at gigs from oh! 3 weeks ago has a little bit to do with the uptick in that part of the world.

Hope everyone involved in those upticks gets better soon.

I’m going to put the dinner on now and refill the glass with ice cubes before settling down to the latest edition of Sun-Kissed with Tashnarr, Tessachka and Omgvandi being storytellered by TheWanderingInn in a Vampire the Masquerade game. Is good chilled out stuff, much better than your average evening telly.

Stay safe everyone, be well.