Hello everyone,
England is warm at the moment. As in un… I almost wrote unseasonably warm but July seems to have become our It’s A Scorcher month. There’s a reason my desktop PC got called Meltdown and it’s only partly down to me not understanding the instructions on the cpu cooler and initially installing it with a protective thing still on it (I’ll come back to that in a bit !)
Yep. We’re having a toasty week and the only time this week I’ll be in air con is Monday and Tuesday just gone. (Work trip). That’s one reason the graphics card buying hasn’t happened yet (oh and they’re too expensive and rare still). Not gaming much at the moment because that just adds heat to the room. The upgrades coming by the way are :
Cpu Cooler swap. I’ve had a better one for a while but this is a sizeable job because the motherboard needs to come out to do it. It’s almost more efficient to swap everything over to a new case which I might need to do anyway for :
Graphics card. I’ll be upgrading from an ageing 1060 3GB card up to a 3060 12GB card. It has at least 3 times the parallel processing power, which means it can push more pixels around and do more Make Everything Shiny transformations on to build up the picture. The extra memory means it can hold a shinier picture and better looking textures. But I might need to get one that’ll be an uncomfortable fit in my case.
Hard disc. I’ve actually got one of these ready but I need to a) install it, b) copy everything on a drive over to it c) swap them over. And I’ll need to do that when I’m not using the desktop. So I’ve held off on that one.
Gosh, can’t remember much more and I’m definitely missing something. That’ll be the heat …
There we go. That’s the Admiral Luperza, which had a little outing trying out the combat side. The game actually did ok with the combat, although the lighting bugs are disastrous at the moment. The best place to find a series of fights in Elite is to go to Resource Extraction Zones in the rings around planets. They’re giving a rating according to how hostile a zone they will be, so you can find your level. It works well for the gameplay. However … the lighting bugs in the Odyssey update mean that the planet can be black, the rings can be black and you have no idea how close you are to them due to black things on black background. It’s an issue. I could get round this in combat by enabling a Night Vision mode, which adds a green border to everything.
Here we go :
This is how the game looked in the debug camera mode and this was considerably brighter than the black landscape I was looking at from the pilot’s seat. The lighting is another known, crippling, issue with the Odyssey changes.
That one is the same place, a little bit earlier as I was coming in to land. It’s had the touch of the GIMP with an Auto White Balance. It worked pretty well ? This isn’t the brightness level I’d expect but it’s far better than the brightness available. It’s a bit disturbing that the lighting in the external camera is different to the lighting from the cockpit …
Anyway. Pretty game is still rather pretty if you can find a place that allows the game to show off the graphics and there are numerous bugs and downright broken stuff getting in the way of that.
Oh ! I’ve managed to get myself distracted …
Admin fun – it looks like WordPress have pushed an update out and the Waterfox browser I use most has started refusing to load the Add New Post thing. So I’m writing this on Chrome. It’s handy to have an alternative. Waterfox (it’s a fork of Firefox) has been a good browser over the years but it does have problems running some sites and others (like Youtube dashboard) just say NO when you try and use it to access them.
Hopefully I’ll get that access back soon.
Cooler thing ? I mentioned that earlier … Computer coolers have advanced a lot over the years. In the old days, it used to be a spring clip that would attach to two hooks on either side of the socket. Now, you have a bracket on the underside of the motherboard under the socket. The cooler sits on top of the processor in the socket and a screw at each of the four corners go all the way through the motherboard connecting it together from above and below. I missed the instruction that said to remove a compressible protection thing from the backplate, so it wasn’t going together correctly. (It has to be firmly clamped to take the heat away). No permanent damage – phew !
Blood boiling ?
That’ll be the Olympics.
There’s a number of unsavoury stories coming out about the Olympics. I’ll let you look them up or you’ve probably heard them already. I’m not going to repeat them too much here. One is about the composer of the ceremony music, who has been exposed as an extreme bully. Not a good look for the organisers.
There are an increasing number of stories about the organisers being way too proscriptive about what the competitors are supposed to be wearing. And this is where the blood starts boiling.
Unless you are required to wear specific things for safety reasons, you should have full choice on what you wear if you are doing a sport. So a sailor will wear a lifejacket and harness if they’re on deck because we don’t want to lose anyone over the side. And that goes for the racers too. Motor racing people are bedecked in fireproof gear and wear a crash helmet. It’s to give them a fighting chance to survive in a crash.
For my own sport, protection is mostly optional. It’s the choice of the player as to what they wear. Personally, I went by the maxim of “If I wear too much, I will get hit more” because I trusted myself to get out of the way. But I always wore the leg pads, the box for my bloke bits, the gloves and I started wearing a helmet after a freak ball to head incident. Picture ?
Cricket leaves it mostly optional with regards how much protection people use, although I think it became mandatory for kids to wear the helmets. With the cricket, it’s a really bad idea to face a cricket ball without the pads, it’s not a matter of If you get hurt, it’s when. Similar with the gloves, they’re there to take the impact of a cricket ball that will break fingers. And the helmet is there to take the energy of the ball, instead of that energy going into your head. But this is all I wore, I tried an arm guard and got hit more with it, same story for thigh guards. I’ve seen someone get hit in the bit that the pink object protects and he was down for quite a while. (I was hit just to the side a few times)
A couple of examples in the cricket – Mithali Raj (superb Indian cricket lady) used to bat in a floppy hat and I adored her for doing so. Cos I used to bat in the floppy hat too and there was a kinship thing there. But it wasn’t about the floppy hat, it was a highlight watching this lady bat because she was incredibly skilled and it was great to watch. Same with Sarah Taylor, absolute legend of a wicket keeper (best I’ve seen of men and women players), I used to have a pang of “I want to watch what she does because it’s awesome but I don’t want to see her get hit on the head and hurt.” Sarah Taylor used to go by not wearing the helmet because it slowed her down but switched to keeping in the helmet later. A lot of the Asian cricketers go to caps or hats when batting against slower bowlers and take the helmet off.
I applaud them for their choices, either way. It’s a sensible balance of risk against the danger. It’s their choice too, they’re aware of the consequences if they get hit and they accept the risk involved. Oh and Mithali Raj was still playing for India in the recent series against England and was giving an exceptional show with leading the way with her batting.
But this is the other end of the scale. Yep. Mandate gear if it’s safety related. I’m all for that. We should have our sports people able to compete to the maximum without fear of getting hurt. And that goes for reducing the amount they wear when it’s really, really hot. (I’m thinking of tennis people here)
Cricket let one of the mandatory outfits for women crickets go quite a few years ago. The one that enforced above knee skirts. URG. It’s good to see them go in favour of the ladies being able to wear ankle length trousers instead. There’s a safety thing there as well, the exposed skin is far more vulnerable to cricket balls.
And then we get to the stories coming out of the Olympics …
One was from a few weeks ago and it was about the caps that the swimmers are required to wear. Swimmers with Big Hair not being allowed to wear suitable sized caps. Let them ! It’s identity. It’s their character. We need our sports people to be Characters and not just faceless individuals forced to squish into a mould. If the big cap slows them down, that’s their choice. We shouldn’t be forcing them to look a certain way.
Olympic sport should be all about who is the best on the day and that’s in performance, skill and how they manage to bring all their talent at their sport out. Sometimes they blow it. Applaud them anyway and give them your support again next time. They work really hard to get to where they are.
It should not be about the show. Cricket’s previously been doing really well because the players of all codes have been spectacularly bringing it lately. From Harleen Deol’s catch on the boundary, England’s all round class with the ladies and some spectacular stuff with the men as well. Their appearance is just a side show, it’s not something we should care about. I don’t watch women’s cricket because of any thought that the players might be cute, I watch it because they play a game I love with considerable skill and passion. They’re fierce competitors and it always makes for a compelling game to watch.
And then we come to the beach volleyball and what’s happened with the Norwegian Ladies. They want to play in shorts instead of the bikini bottoms. And they’ve been fined for it. I AM SHOCKED.
This is where the blood starts boiling. I guess that the skimpy clothing is justified because it’s hot and sand gets everywhere. And then Something gets involved and instead of it being a test of skill, it’s about a sideshow in skimpy outfits.
When I’m watching sport, I’m invested in who’s going to win. And that’s being really happy for the one who knocked it out of the park and was better than everyone else and being sad for the one in tears because they tripped up right at the start and didn’t let their talent out to play that day. They’re both awesome. It’s better to try and fail than not try. When I’m watching the endurance motor racing, I’m more likely to be rooting for the people down the field who have lost huge time to mechanical issues and they’re fighting to stay in the race. They tried, failed and then try to recover. I have massive respect for that.
I’m not interested in what they look like, although Happy Smiling People make me happy too. Oh and if they have distinct character too, like the ski jumper with the enormous moustache. Loved that.
The sooner we can get away from archaic attitudes like mandatory outfits for things like sport the better. It should be the player’s choice for what they wear for their sport and they’ll optimise their gear choice to make them better at it. The only thing that should matter is where there might be a performance benefit coming in, like a bigger bat, gloves that let them catch unfairly better or prosthetics that have better tech then the competition.
Erm. It’s hot I kinda ranted.
Make your own mind up with the stories about sport at the moment and the really bad looking ones around the Olympics. Watch sport for the skill, not because you fancy the players or you like watching people in skimpy outfits. Respect the performance, not the appearance.
And I’ll now retreat back into my Not Wearing Much (get that picture out of your head for your own sanity !) and trying to keep functioning in the heat. Roll on Saturday :-D.