May the Fourth Cup be Earl Gray Hot

Hello everyone,

Oops, I blinked and another fortnight went by since the last post. What’s been happening ?

Picture. It's a meme picture of two Ewoks (about 3 foot tall bipedal bears) wearing hoods and a tie. One is holding an open book, the other a picture of a golden bipedal robot. The captions are "Excuse me sir ...." and "Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Saviour C3PO ??"
Not now Goldenrod

No remote control car yet, although I found a different site that seems cheaper, has a wider choice and also gives very clear advice on what’s needed to have a complete thing at the end of it. What’s stopping me ? Firstly, no idea where to put it, I need to rouse myself from eternal tiredness and do a number of jobs around here, not least of which is clearing out some of the clutter.

Oh and also, none of the normal car type models really speaks to me in a “I connect with that model” kind of way. I’m not that interested in the Porsche, Ford GT and Merc models ? Maybe the Toyota Supra, maybe the Miata / MX-5. Here’s a car I was close to going for back in the day :

Picture. A mostly white coupe car with flashes of red and grey paint. It has an aggressive body kit with widened wheels and spoiler wings front and back.
Yep. It’s a Capri

When I was looking to move on from the Astra Mk1 I had, the Ford Capri was one of the cars on the radar. It never happened, partly due to the possibility of finding one. Also because … the Capri was a little bit rubbish and things worked out to put me in the rather spicy and much superior Belmont SRi instead. There’s another bit of Stuff’s Gone Weird here too. I just looked at Autotrader to see what Capri’s are going for now, here’s a link to the cheapest. Yep. That’s a 2 litre Ford Capri going for £12,000. It’s not even one of the good ones ! It does look good though. Crazy things have happened to the classic car market now, there’s been hefty increases in prices happening. Perhaps it’s because all the not so good ones have rusted away and only the excellent and looked after ones are left.

Remote control cars ? Here’s a link to the Zakspeed Capri model page, the model from the picture. That’s Modelsport’s pages and I do like that they give the Bundle things as an option for getting the bits. Without clicking, it would be £222 for car, radio gear, batteries and charger. Not bad and probably a good kit for a learner person.

Time seems to be going whooshing by at the moment doesn’t it ? Perhaps it’s because what we do isn’t being broken up as much as it used to be due to the working from home pattern. Or it might be a much better state at work because what I know is being properly utilised instead of being shunted aside and pretty much ignored. That got grating after a while and it’s been good to have the old knowledge reactivating again. It’s kinda like doors in my mind reopening.

Gaming has been happening too, which might be a reason why the time is whooshing by. The Motorsport Manager campaign was completed tonight. It’s been an epic run going over I think 35 seasons and finishing in game year 2049. The target was to win the championships in all 3 of its single seater, GT and endurance racing. It’s a cracking game, it’s certainly kept me interested and engaged for (uhoh) 1795 gameplay hours since picking it up pretty much on release in November 2016.

There’s another motor racing manager game coming, this time by Frontier. I have my doubts over this one. The genre is horrendously difficult to make a good game for. I’ve previously played Grand Prix Manager 2, GP World and F1 Manager … and bounced off them because they were either annoying (GPM2) or fatally bugged. I can’t even remember what was wrong with the original F1 Manager. One issue with GP World is that campaigns could only last a couple of seasons before inflation made it impossible to run a team, plus it had fatal bugs. Hopefully the Frontier one is a good game, they certainly need to reverse their fortunes after the disasters of Elite Odyssey (still bugged) and Lemnis Gate (meh and ignored). Chaos Gate is looking good on stream, although that’s published by Frontier, not developed by Frontier.

Other gaming ? I just installed Mass Effect again … This is the Remastered version, so it’ll have all sorts of graphical updates, including better lighting so you can see their world better. That’ll be good to play again, although I suspect I may drift away from it during Mass Effect 3. The Mass Effect games tell a terrific story and there’s a wonderful fresh new world to explore during the first two games but … I do like a happy ending and ME3 is anything but that. It’s one reason why I’ll enjoy reading The Expanse novels again, they pulled off an excellent ending there.

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Simulator 2. We're looking at our truck on a 2 lane motorway. The camera is looking from behind and from the right. The truck is green and towing a flatbed that has an orange tracked digger on it. There are tall wind turbines to the left and right of the road which curves gently to the left. In the distance there are blue skies and pretty clouds.
Keep on truckin’

I’m still playing the Truck Game, although the addiction isn’t quite as strong as it was. It’s a good chilled out game when you’re on your own on the road, going from place to place and delivering varied things. Especially with a graphical mod or two installed like improved headlights so you can see more than a little postage stamp of screen when it gets dark. I looked at trying modding to put in a custom paint job, that needs a bit more brain cell activity than I was willing to give though. I’ll attack it again at some point.

Other stuff :

Netflix is gone now. I just wasn’t using the subscription and their output isn’t that interesting any more. It’s part annoyance at them setting up good series like The Expanse and Cowboy Bebop and then letting them go. At least The Expanse got rescued by Prime (need to watch s6) but it’s sad that Bebop was ended early. It was its own story inspired by the anime and was building in a rather promising fashion. It’s a shame Faye wasn’t in more, I liked the live action character more than the anime version and she didn’t really get enough episodes to have fun in.

There’s a few too many streaming services out there now. I haven’t watched any of the new Star Wars stuff, or the various Marvel series. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything there. So that’s Netflix, Disney, Apple and I dunno how many more. It’s a lot … The fear of missing out is quite active. Oh ! Paramount+ coming soon here for Star Trek. I’d very much like to watch Strange New Worlds, the Enterprise crew that was in Discovery season 2 was excellent, especially Anson Mount being a very charismatic and commanding Captain Pike.

But I’m not wanting to sign up to a I dunno how much a month service just to watch one series.

Oh ! Getting late. Time to get the Tashnarr Chaos Gate stream centre stage again and I left A Bad Deal For The Whole Galaxy at a rather delicate cliff hanger yesterday.

Be well everyone !