Sleepypete's Pillow - I like exploring in computer games, music, cricket, drawing and pizza and sharing those with people. Oh and I also inherited the name Sleepydwagonman too ! The site is a work in progress at the moment but it's getting there, features will come in over time !

So you’re thinking about building a PC …

July 16, 2025

11:54 pm

Comments Off on So you’re thinking about building a PC …

Hi all, first of all … why would you want to do that ?

There are lots of manufacturers and sites that will happily assemble and set up a PC for you. So why would you want to build your own ?

Picture. Meme. We're looking at the back of a computer lying flat on a table. To the left and looking out is a white and dark furred cat. The caption is "Oh i, I upgraded your RAM"

The answer for me is very simple. I get total choice on what’s going into the machine for both the components and the software. I can put a bit of extra money in one thing that I think is important and make a sacrifice in something else that I don’t think will matter. I can future proof without breaking the bank. And probably the most important, it gets set up without any of the garbage software that the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will preinstall that either doesn’t go away completely when you uninstall it or it comes back again. It’s also bundled stuff like the malware that masquerades as branded anti-virus security software.

You could even choose to go away from the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and go to Linux now. That’s more viable, although I’ll come back to that in a while.

The most important thing is to do as much research as possible before you buy. Retails and online sites will be very keen to put discounts on selected models in their range. If you get tempted by those, ask yourself why the discount is happening. Is the discount because they have a stack of stock they can’t shift out of the warehouse because no one buys it ? Or are they dumping stock because it’s just gone obsolete and end of line. I’ve actually taken advantage of that for my last two laptops, they were both acquired on heavy end of line discounts and happened to be specifications that met my requirement.

This is probably the time for … Disclosure note ! All the decisions for the bits here were mine, I paid for everything, the companies mentioned have no idea who I am and no approaches had been made prior to selection of the bits. (Outside of the usual Overclockers and Scan we’ve got your email in our database robot marketing emails)

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a black and white cat sitting before an opened laptop computer. Their right paw is on the computer mouse. The captions are "I ordered a vault and a speaker online." "They arrived safe and sound"

The catalyst for this post is to introduce the new build PC that appeared here over Easter. It’s the BunnyBox, named for when it was built again :-D. It follows Pumpkin, assembled on Oct 31 2011 and Meltdown, built on the hottest July day of 2019. But the main aim is to tell all of you reading that : You can do this too. Yes. You can. If you can handle a screwdriver and have a fairly light touch, you can build your home brew PC as well.

The key thing is to do all of the research before you part with any money. I have to admit to making a few mistakes with the BunnyBox, some of which were down to not researching properly, some were trusting the reviews a bit too much. Some mistakes and problems were making some bad assumptions. Oh and I may have forgotten to add the system memory to the order and had to hang around Stoke on Trent a while so they could fetch some out of the warehouse.

But the absolute key thing is : It’s YOUR money. YOUR decision to commit to spending it. Don’t ever feel pressured about spending YOUR money unless you’re absolutely comfortable in doing so. That goes for any pressure you may feel to up the spec when you don’t feel that’s affordable or presents value that you’re comfortable with.

Here’s the BunnyBox spec from Partpicker (linky). Partpicker is actually a really decent site to go to when researching the bits that go together to make a PC. They cut their selections down to what’s compatible. So if you choose an AMD cpu, they won’t show motherboards made for Intel chips. When I updated the list for the memory, it didn’t show memory that the board couldn’t handle. So it’s a handy thing to start from to see what’s out there and quickly get a list of bits.

Picture. We're looking down at a white computer motherboard with various sockets. Middle left is a black square of a processor socket. Above left are 4 black long sockets. Centre screen is a storage slot. And there's a long white socket for a graphics card.

That’s your motherboard, which everything plugs in to. There are different connectors for everything and they only go in one way around, so the only mistake you can make is to press too hard and break something that way. Don’t worry about that. Modern computer electronics are far more robust than when I was a lad too. It used to be that TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) chips would break if you touched them wrong, electro static discharge wrist bands used to be required so you wouldn’t zap the bits. I don’t believe you need those these days. (Please no sue me if something doesn’t work ! 😀 ).

The first thing to go in was a 4TB Solid State Device (SSD) storage device. This is an nVME drive, which is the faster one. It’s an M2 format, which is a small card like a stick of chewing gum. Don’t eat it, too crunchy and expensive 😀

Picture. We're looking down at the white motherboard again, which has had a storage device added in the centre. It's a long thing flat card with a black finned metal heatsink on top, with the labels Crucial T500 to tell people what it is.

Here comes my first error, because I bought the more expensive one with a heatsink on. Cos … Meltdown’s similar SSD gave no problems in almost 6 years but it did run warm. The mistake was not researching that the board came with its own heatsink. I didn’t need to buy the one fixed to the drive. Oh well, coulda saved some cash.

I bought a single SSD because I was assuming that BunnyBox would be running a version of the Linux Operating System and didn’t know how that handled multiple drives. So I bought a bigger (4TB) cheaper one for significantly less than a quicker one of the same size.

Techie note – you’ll see PCIe, that’s the interface of how the components talk to each other. If you look at a computer architecture diagram, the wiring will connect blocks together mostly with the Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe). It’s express cos it’s the considerably improved Mk2 version of PCI, which first got into PCs in the 90s. M2 SSD drives will show a Gen 4, Gen 5 and if you read this in a few years, probably Gen 6 and beyond. The newer versions offer improved transfer rates which might give you a benefit if you’re doing heavy data crunching but I figured I could save pennies (to go into better other bits) by not noticing going for a cheaper ultra fast drive.

Picture. Computer build. We're looking down at the white motherboard. Centre screen we see the square spot for the processor but the aim here is to show the memory. It's a rectangula stick component covered by a black metal heatsink. There are gold connectors on the base and a notch is cut slightly off centre.

That’s the memory going in. That picture actually shows the stick the wrong way around, because I wanted to draw attention to the notch that’s in the bottom of the stick. That’s a polarising notch and makes sure the memory goes in the correct way around because the polarising notch is slightly off the centre. When it’s in right, the grabby arms to the sides of the socket will do their grabby arm thing and close up. You might need to rest the board on something very solid here so it doesn’t flex when you put the memory in. Use the anti-static bag it comes in between Board and Solid Thing to protect everything.

Something else to note here is the sockets to use. There are 4 on the board there, so I could add more in later. However if you look real close (left side of the socket) and can read upside down, you’ll see DDR_A1, DDR_A2, DDR_B1 and DDR_B2 with a “First” beside them. Processors can gobble up 128 bits of data at a time, however the memory sticks send out only 64 bits at a time. So you double them up to get full performance. But they only work doubled up if they’re in the correct sockets. The board manual will tell you which sockets are best. If you put the memory in sockets DDR_A1 and DDR_B2 (mismatched sockets) then your new PC may not boot up at all.

Picture. We're looking at a huge red framed PC chassis. The internals are black. There are three large fans in the base, two very large fans back and right and a very large fan on the left. Two red dwagon helpers are dwarfed at the base.

Pardon the messiness of my bedsheet ! The camera picks up all of the dust and I don’t think I have the hand capacity to edit it out :-D. That’s the box, it’s an absolute unit of a Montech King 95 Pro. The 6 fans there are utterly silent when the machine is on and have the gloriness of already being assembled and cabled in to the box. You might see a bit of ducting below and there is more ducting above. The power supply goes in the back and the motherboard sits on that vertical plate. I’m extremely impressed with this case, it has exceptional build quality, it was easy to fit the All In One Cooler in the box above there and the box can fit the biggest coolers. However, it’s also a massive unit, comes in at 13kg and was a pricey £125. Honestly, with the build quality and 6 included silent fans, probably well worth that.

Picture. We're looking at the matt black chassis bones of the PC. To the right, a box with a fan in it and the label Lian Li. There is a double row of connectors on the left of the box. Wires stretch up the bones of the box with a couple of plugs on the left. Our small red dwagon helper is supervising.

That’s the power supply going in there. Two things here … don’t skimp on the quality, so extra money went into the Lian Li supply there. I have a few power supply makers on my list of shame, Lian Li is actually a new one for me but they have a stellar reputation. The other is to get a big enough one that it can take it easy with the components in the box. So a 750W supply taking it easy at a 500W draw will last so much longer than a 500W supply straining to consistently deliver the same 500W.

It’s a false economy to go cheap on the power supply. Getting a good name one (like Lian Li) will lead to a more reliable and stable machine. And if it breaks, standards like 80+ GOLD means that it won’t break anything else when it … explodes. Not like a friend’s PC which broke all of its components when the cheap no name inadequate power supply melted. PSUs don’t explode … but don’t take one apart to find out as there is 115/240V in there, definitely don’t mess with the big round capacitors, those are the bits that can go boom.

That’s a modular power supply. The older ones came with all of their cables attached to ends on the inside, so they had a mass of unused cable to hide. A modular supply has those sockets there, so you only plug in the cables you require. Less untidy.

Picture. We're looking down at the PC. The white motherboard is now installed in the case. There is a silver processor where the black socket cover was before. The large red dwagon helper is supervising from the left.

That’s skipping ahead a little to the motherboard installed in the box with the processor in there too. The box there is an ATX format box, with ATX dating back to the 90s. Literally IBM AT PC extended. There are newer formats like ITX out there but ATX has been consistent for decades. There is a sockets backplane on the bottom right and the board is secured by an array of small screws.

That’s an AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3d and BunnyBox has one of those due to a big discount that put it in an unbeatable price / performance bracket. I also have a lot of wariness about Intel at the moment because their quality and part resilience has gone downhill lately due to decisions made by their management.

The installation is a bit different again this time around. That’s an AMD AM5 socket. The lever on the left is for a so-called Zero Insertion Force socket. (It’s not zero force!) You use the lever to allow the socket to open and slide the ickle processor into the socket. Again, it’s polarized with the little dot you’ll see on the lower right corner to make sure you put it in the right way round. When you lower the retaining bracket, the black cover seen previously pops off and the lever then locks it in to place.

We can see a couple of black plastic things there too, every processor needs to be cooled because they’ll kick out a lot more heat when they’re busy. The first cooler this machine had was an All In One (AIO) Cooler by Thermalright. These work by having a heat block that clamps on top of the processor using the hooks on the plastic things above and below. The AIO is then connected to a radiator with a couple of pipes filled with cooling fluid. There’s a pump that circulates the fluid and fans to cool the radiator. It’s a lot easier to install coolers on the AM5 generation of socket than the previous AM4 generation.

Picture. We're looking at the fully assembled PC there. Top of shot, three fans connected to a radiator fixed to the top of the case. Two white pipes from the right lead to a cylindrical block on top of the processor. We see the fans from before, plus there is a graphics card installed with "Force RTX", actually GeForce RTX.

That’s everything together ! Not quite, because there are buttons and plugs and lights and sockets to wire up too. The PC case has 2 older USB, 1 new USB-C, a couple of audio sockets, a reset button, a power button and a power light. These all plug into sockets on the board, the motherboard manual will have the where to’s here.

But that is actually it. The graphics card is in there as well. Note how close it is to the processor, I’ll come back to that. Also note how close the memory is on the right there. (Foreshadowing anyone ? 😀 )

The next thing is to take a long solid drink, clean up the mess from any blood sacrifices that might have happened along the way. Depending on the build quality of the components, you might have picked up a cut or two. Cheap cases have many more sharp edges. I only got a very minor cut this time around for the somewhat required blood sacrifice. It keeps the Machine Spirit happy :-D.

Plan A for BunnyBox was to abandon Microsoft and go over to Linux. I attempted using Bazzite Linux, as the reviews and things written about it were favourable. It’s worth checking out Linux, it’s free so you lose nothing but a bit of time in exchange for learning about the alternatives that are out there.

This lasted 1 day.

He he, overly dramatic moment there. The machine actually fired up and installed easily first time but I removed it from the machine because I was getting terrible performance with older games like Idle Champions and Motorsport Manager. The Steam platform is starting to get more games designed for Linux but can also support Windows only games by using the Proton translation library. That wasn’t working so good for me, possibly because the Bazzite install didn’t have the info to allow it to properly use the brand new to market nVidia 5060Ti 16GB I bought. And because I couldn’t see how to install the new drivers, I put Bazzite in the bin and went straight back to the known entity of Windows with a WIndows 11 install.

You live, you learn, you add more knowledge.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a concerned looking Corgi dog lying on a bed with an open book in front of them. The captions are "This homework looks hard" "Do you want me to eat it?"

So I pop Windows in there, install the Horizon Zero Dawn in there and run its benchmark. All is good. Temperatures go up but it gives a result of 160 fps wibblies which was up from the 71 fps wibblies that Meltdown could achieve. It’s an older game but has a good benchmark for testing purposes.

I then look at the BOINC science sums application and … the temperatures rapidly go off into orbit and as AMD Ryzens do, the machine goes into thermal protection where it slows itself down to around a tenth of its potential performance. This is where the panic comes in. I’ll do a bit TLDR there (this post has gone LONG!) and say that I think the AIO cooler wasn’t taking any heat away from the processor, the pipes and radiator were cold. So I swapped it out for …

Picture. A rather filmy misty obscured look into the finalised BunnyBox PC build. We see the fans rimmed in blue light with a huge cooler in the centre. It's made out two big metal blocks sandwiching an equally large fan.

Yeah. I went back to what I know and bought the most massive air cooler from a good make that I could get hold of at short notice. That’s a Noctua NH-D15 and while it is a fantastic cooler, I did make a couple of errors when choosing it. The fan there is a massive 140mm, there are supposed to be two but the other one clashes on the memory sticks. The cooler is installed off axis as well, about 7mm above where it should be, because it clashes with the graphics card below.

So while Partpicker will give you a LOT of info about whether everything will fit together, it doesn’t know everything. I don’t know everything. I still make errors like that by (going back to the start) not doing all of the research. I checked whether the cooler would fit in the case … not whether it would fit around the rest of the components.

But it all works, BunnyBox is rock solid so far, it’s an absolute powerhouse running the performance hungry Star Wars Outlaws with no frame drops on very high detail so I’m a happy little bunnydwagon here tapping this post into it.

I think that’s where I’d better leave it before I end up posting tomorrow instead of today. I’ll leave you with :

You got this, you can do it too. Read about what you’re planning to put together, use hardware review sites (like Tomshardware) and borrow the specs from their testing rigs. Learn about the bits and it’ll help you out when you have the screwdriver in hand and assembling.

Take it easy, take your time. Don’t panic if things don’t turn on immediately. Just check that all the wires are where they are supposed to be. Repeat your steps if you have to, measure twice install once that kind of thing.

Animated picture. We're looking at a claymation animated sheep. They are looking towards the right and holding up both paws making a thumbs up motion. The caption is "I believe in you".

And compare notes with your local geeky techy community too. We’ll love to gossip about components and tempt people into buying new bits and pieces. Just remember that it’s your money, your budget, stick to those limits. If you’re not sure about what you’re about to do, hold off and learn a bit more. Computer bits only get cheaper and better if you wait.

May your Machine Spirits be contented little beasties.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

It’s a tad warm to be racing around

by Sleepypete

July 1, 2025

9:26 pm

Comments Off on It’s a tad warm to be racing around

cars

racing

Hello everyone,

It’s gone a bit warm here ! Time for another of the look back and catch ups that I need to do.

Picture meme. We're looking at a German Shepherd type dog looking at someone unseen behind us and to the left. They have a party hat on. There is a plate with a dog biscuit bone shaped thing with 5 lit candles in it. The caption is "I just wanted to eat but you lit my food on fire."

I bet that’s how it feels for everyone with birthdays at this time of year :-D.

Motor racing ? I always look forward to watching the Le Mans 24 hours race and the Nurburgring 24 hours race. They’re the motor racing highlights of the year for me. The tracks are great and there’s a big variation in the cars and teams to especially spice things up.

Whereas most racing circuits are only a few miles long and it takes between a minute or two to go around them, the Le Mans Circuit de la Sarthe is 13.6km long and the Nurburgring Nordschleife is even longer at 25km long. It takes the current top flight hypercars 3.5 minutes to go around the Le Mans circuit and GT3 cars 3 minutes 50 seconds to go around there. The hypercars don’t race on the Nordschleife, the racing there this year was between 136 cars in 27 different classes. The GT3 equivalent there take just over 8 minutes to do a single lap, with the slower cars taking about 11 minutes for a lap. They start the formation lap twenty minutes before the race is scheduled to start and they cut down on potential mayhem by having three separate starting groups.

There are a few reasons why I enjoy watching this form far more than racing like Formula 1 – one of the biggest and we’ll get this out the way first is that the racing is very honest and there’s very little of the infantile behaviour we see from the Formula 1 circus. 😀 Got that out the way so we can focus on the positives.

Picture, meme. We're looking at a tiny white kitten looking at us from inside a black with red fire trim motorcycle helmet. The captions are "Ai haz a motocycle unner here. Mah helmet iz jus' too big."

Another strength of the endurance racing is just how competitive it is now. Previous years have seen the winning cars form up and cross the finishing line in an arranged formation. They could do that because the cars would have laps separating them not. Not now though ! If you want to skip the results (the races were a few weeks before typing so I figure it’s safe to drop these), please do jump ahead to where I post the next meme. That’ll be the Safe Spot. (Now I have to find another meme !)

Le Mans was a close finish again this year, with the 83 yellow privateer team Ferrari finishing strongly being chased by one of the Porsche hypercars. I think the winning margin was about 15 seconds, with the two factory Ferraris taking it a bit easier behind because they were having to limit the driving because they thought their engines were about to go boom.

We’ll see variation in how the cars do as well in the different conditions. The Toyotas weren’t doing so good in the day this year but were very strong in the night. The drivers race the cars at 110%, balancing that in the knowledge that a small incident can either take them out of contention completely or mean they’re in the pits for a couple of laps getting fixed up. That’ll take them out of the running for a win but they can recover to good points playing positions as other cars get incidents.

Nurburgring was a bit of an odd one this year. The organisers know that it’s not a particularly safe track, with a small misjudgment quickly going from getting away with it to having an upside down or otherwise trashed car. F1 cars and the hypercars wouldn’t be racing here because the run off areas are non existent on a very challenging track. if there’s an accident then it will probably be a big one.

So the organisers would usually heavily punish drivers who broke the safety rules. That didn’t happen this year … drivers were being permitted to keep their licenses to race on the track even after doing things like driving at 160+km/h in qualifying when the track had been closed due to a red flag incident. And that was the winner of the race … Other drivers were doing that as well. I hope we see a reaction next year before we get a more serious incident than the ones this year that leads to injured marshals or drivers.

Because we want the racing to be fast, close and with drama … but we don’t want anyone to be hurt during the event.

Another note there – one of the drivers of the 83 Ferrari at Le Mans was Robert Kubica who was retired from F1 contention after suffering multiple serious injuries (details at the wiki link) in a rallying accident. F1 will turn a lot of its discarded drivers into a joke with a trashed reputation, those drivers will then find their way into endurance racing and proceed to show the world what they can do in a competitive racing car. Will Stevens and Antonio Giovinazzi both started in F1, got quickly labelled as terrible drivers because they were in awful cars. Put them in a hypercar and they turn it into a rocket ship.

Picture, black and white meme. We're looking at a vintage open wheeled car speeding toward us down a twisty road. The rather concerned driver is looking to his left ... at one of the car wheels in the air bouncing away. The captions are "Why risk certain death? Because race car"

And I better emerge out of the spoiler space before I ramble too much 😀

A big difference for the Nurburgring is the vast array of cars that compete there. The main result will be fought out very closely between the GT3 sports cars. There was less than 10 seconds over the 8 minute lap separating the top cars in qualifying. And then there are the multitude of slower, less expensive cars that allow people and teams with less resources to compete and even take the scalps of faster cars that had incidents.

Cars like the humble Dacia Logan, which had been upgraded to have a Renault turbo engine that gives it the potential to be competitive in class along with the Beetle RSR car. I was following a Mini that was racing there too.

A lot of the time, I’ll have the racing coverage on a hidden tab with the commentary coming through and I’ll be keeping an eye on the timing numbers. I’ll be following the Dacia, the Beetle, the Mini and cars that have had incidents climbing the field again after they get patched up. I’ll be saying “Dacia’s gonna get you” as the slowest car climbs ahead of a fast car that’s had something unfortunate (and suddenly violent) happen to it.

The mix of cars and speeds of cars also opens up opportunities for the fast cars to close gaps and get past too. It keeps the racing dynamic and interesting. There’s rarely a dull moment, especially in modern day endurance racing where it’s a series of sprints for the full duration of the race broken up by them having a little breather in the pits while they refuel, change tyres and swap out the drivers. There’s almost always something going on.

Have I sold it yet ?

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a cat in a window sill in a curious posture like they're holding a steering wheel in their front paws. The captions are "Invisible race car, Purrrrrrrrr I iz NASCAR racer."

The two big 24 hour races are both done for this year now, we have to wait until next year for Nurburgring and Le Mans again. In the meantime, there are more World Endurance Championship races to go, sadly behind a firewall. There is IMSA racing in the USA, these races go between under 2 hours to the Daytona 24 hour race at the start of the year. I should watch more IMSA racing again, I’ve lost touch with it.

There’s also European Le Mans and Asian Le Mans series. I should look into these, they’re not something I’ve watched.

But whereas F1 quickly degenerates into something in the background to ignore while I’m reading a book, the hypercar and GT3 endurance racing stays compelling even after the longer duration.

Check it out 🙂

PS Also in racing around … Gromit Unleashed 3 started today, I’ll hopefully find my way out and about around as many of the statues as I can get to. I’ll need the temperature to be a bit less though, 2025 me is very unfit and I’m struggling more and more in the heat. But if it’s cool, we’ll see what we can do. Here’s a link to the old blog with the tag that has the Gromit stories.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

I think I need a duster

by Sleepypete

June 17, 2025

10:08 pm

Comments Off on I think I need a duster

events

games, geeky, picture

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while ! Again !

Picture. We're looking at a square white board with black edges. The black writing inside says "You can touch the dust but please don't write in it."

Apologies, it’s been a little too long since I wrote anything here last. Now that I’m starting up a post again, it’s feeling good to be tapping the words out again. How come there hasn’t been a post for a while ? Probably a lot of exhaustion there. I realised that instead of being on the recovery from the massive burn out (and probably very long covid) from a few years ago, I’m probably even deeper in that burn out.

Not quite sure how I pull out of that burn out, it might need some more bigger lifestyle changes. We’ll see there. So what’s been happening while I’ve been away ? What’s at risk of disappearing into lost memory because I didn’t write it down somewhere ? Here goes !

Last time I wrote that new PC bits were going to happen. This post is being written on the BunnyBox PC, so called because it was (mostly!) built at Easter this year. I’ve just done a Partpicker list of the bits. There we go. It was a bit more eventful than it really should have been, let’s just say that it’s on :

Its second Operating System;

Its second cpu cooler …

Yep. There was some light drama there … Only light drama though because nothing actually exploded. The Bunny actually benchmarked the same in a game called Horizon Zero Dawn with the non functioning original cooler as well as the massive lump that’s in there now. But I’m getting ahead of things there …

Picture. We're looking inside a PC box. There are three blue lit fans below. One blue list fan to the left. Two to the back and right. In the centre, a couple of big lumps of heatsink metal sandwiching a big fan.

There we go. That’s the gubbins with the big lump of an air cooler in there. Bunny’s story needs its own post really but the TLDR is that I experimented with going with Linux first. That didn’t work out because the performance in games was pretty nasty, probably because the system was working off older drivers that didn’t fully support the brand new to market 5060Ti 16GB card that’s in there. And I couldn’t see how to quickly and efficiently update them. So Linux came off and my 2019 copy Windows 10 went on. And then that updated to current Windows 10 … and finally I’m running on Windows 11.

Actually this really needs its own post before I tell everything in geek level detail here ! The cooler in the picture there is the replacement for an All In One cooler which … didn’t work. Those are a waterblock to take heat off the cpu. Pipes to circulate that heat around, with a pump. And a big radiator and fans to dissipate that heat. It wasn’t taking the heat away from the cpu.

I now have a failed All in One cooler to disassemble so I can see how it works.

Picture, meme. We're looking at a small red car broken down into all of its component parts (there are too many to count) all set out in orderly rows. The captions are "Car by IKEA, Allen Wrench included."

I could attempt to return it but … it has 3 good 120mm (big but not biggest) fans on there which I can harvest for the top of Bunny PC. Plus I’ve never had an All in One cooler to take apart before.

What else have I been up to ?

Picture. We're looking out over a cricket field with players in mostly dark blue outfits and a couple with red tops. In the foreground, there are rows of seats with a small number of people scattered in them.

That’s from Lords again and we had a full day’s play in the Interservices T20 games this year. I managed to get there super early, pretty much as the games opened. I got there before the tea selling people were selling tea ! There should be a post about the cricket day as well at some point. We’ll see about translating the “want to post need to post” into having the energy left over to actually get posting. I think we’re doing ok here at the moment. Again, the cricket day is one that should get its own post soon.

Following the cricket was a day spent at UK Games Expo. This was a fun Saturday. I stopped overnight on the Friday but just did the one day and night there. Hotels be pricey. Looking back at it, the event is big enough and crowded enough that it could do with a second day there.

Picture. We're looking at a pink and bronze dwagon sitting on a wooden counter top. They're holding a zen pose with palms resting on crossed knees. Behind them is a wood framed dice tray with a picture of a sailing ship and a sea map. Surrounding the dwagon are blue dice with white numbers.

I got loot too ! The dice and tray there are from Trayed and Tested (Etsy link), which is run by the lovely Aby. Good to see them again at UK Games Expo. I also ran into Curlylocksgamer who is enjoying farming in Stardew Valley as I type. Good to meet them too.

And the afternoon was spent with Andy of Billietrixx‘s (Twitch link) community and Billie, browsing the rest of the Expo. Was a very enjoyable bimble with great company. These shows are always best with friends to share the experience with and to point towards the things we may have missed.

No Comic Con this year sadly, Comic Con Friend wasn’t feeling so good so we’ll pick another one to go to. I wasn’t that great either, I probably well overdid it for the Lords trip (Thursday before Comic Con weekend) and needed that weekend to recover as well.

Feel better soon Comic Con Friend !

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. We're looking at a dry arid scene with light colour sandstone buildings and desert off in the distance. Our character is in front facing away wearing a light tan jacket and dark trousers. She's looking at a row of 3 white armoured stormtroopers shooting at targets. They hit everything but the targets.

Better close out now. I’ve been enjoying being able to slam the graphics options up with the new PC. It’s definitely a bit of a beast compared to the last one, which was still going pretty strong. That’s Star Wars Outlaws again, I just ran across this little vignette of Stormtroopers being set the task of target practice. Someone spotted the little critter there looking like it was wondering if it was safer in front of the stormies instead of off to the side.

The game is full of little moments like that. They did a good job with it, although combining the story with randomly generated heist or fetch or elimination missions may extend or pad the game out a bit too much. I’m kinda wanting to be done with it again now. Fun game, maybe feels too long to get everything done. The buildings will be a frame covered by a texture but there is so much detail now in both frame and texture and the graphics cards have the sheer power to turn that complex structure frame and texture picture into a super realistic convincing 3d environment. Says me who will drop 40 hours into a Little Big Workshop run over a couple of real time days. It’s amazing the level of detail in there as well now. The characters will all have full animated skeletons.

Oh I’m not the healthiest with my gaming play profiles ! Little Big Workshop does look much better with the graphics turned up in that too.

It’s been good to pop up again and drop a post in. I have that little few lined up that I need to write words for so that helps preserve them in the memory banks. But for now, back to book. I’m in Off Midway Station by Marc Alan Edelheit at the moment. New author for me, it’s taken half a book to set up his universe but it feels like it’s lighting that blue touch paper to ignite a story that’s going to take off.

To the stars ! Until next time, thanks for reading 🙂

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

New computer bits, Easter Bunny ?

by Sleepypete

April 9, 2025

10:10 pm

Comments Off on New computer bits, Easter Bunny ?

Uncategorized

Hello everyone,

Not sure how much I’ll be able to put into this one because you know I tend to underplay how much things hurt sometimes ? Well I kinda wrecked my wrist and arm so if it starts pain spiking, I’ll need to hit post.

Picture. Meme/ We're looking at two black cats just peeking over the back of a chair. Behind them is an old computer with a blue error screen. The caption is "Dunno what happnd We dint touch it"

What I am hoping is that my poorly arm has enough in it for building a new computer … What’s up with the arm ? It’s been tending to RSI for I dunno how long now but I kinda crunched it on opening the car door yesterday. Like high pain level plus I’ve apparently strained a muscle in the forearm. So I’m holding off on doing more of the gaming that involves more activity, like the hauling in Elite Dangerous or the Truck Sim games do. I’ve also been looking at trains …

Game screenshot. Derail Valley. We're looking at a train heading away from us. It's pulling several flatbed railway cars with wood planks strapped down on them. It's going over a stone brick bridge heading into landscape obscured by mist.

That’s Derail Valley, which is a train driving simulator with its own little area to play in. It’s a curious game, which sees you carrying various bits of cargo from station to station and you can build up what you haul and fix up bigger and better locomotives. There’s a link to Squirrel’s play through on youtube on the last post. But I think that’ll take too many chances with the wrist, so I’ll hold off on it.

What’s happening with the PC ?

Picture. We're looking inside the open box of a very old computer. We can see three kittens climbing inside. The captions are "Thank you for calling Tiny Kitten Repair" and "We accept Visa, Mastercard, Cuddling and Shiny Things" — Will build PCs for pizza, shiny things or cuddles but especially shiny things

There we go. Pizza is life especially if you’re planning to try and all nighter and can therefore don’t need to worry about the tummy not liking all that cheese.

PC ? We’re kinda being pushed into moving off Windows 10 because Microsoft are ending patch support for it, unless we pay through the nose for extended support. So after October, all those vulnerabilities that let the hackers in won’t get patched. That’s for definite. What I also suspect is that as we approach October, Microsoft will get more and more obnoxious with pushing us towards going to Windows 11 and the paranoid / experienced part of my brain also thinks they’ll push out updates that actively harm the performance of Windows 10 machines. Because that’s what they do.

The answer is to put them in the bin … You probably want to do your own research on this and whether it fits you personally with the level of knowledge and expertise you yourself know you have (and be honest with it too, it’ll save heartache later!). But it might well be worth doing the research on what alternatives are available for Microsoft (and Adobe, don’t forget them here too) products and whether you actually need to stay with them. Let’s see what I do on this desktop :

BOINC science – runs on Linux as well.

Gaming – since Steam brought out their Linux based Steamdeck, far more games are being made available either natively (without layers) on Linux or they run as well or better than on Windows via translation layers like Proton. However, if you enjoy the multiplayer online games like Fortnite and League of Legends, research very carefully whether you’d be able to play those.

Stream watching – happens on a browser …

Web browsing – yep see above there …

Picture making and memes – I use GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) for photo editing, which has a native Linux version.

Also consider that if you have an Android phone, that runs on a Linux version that’s been phone-ified.

So Bunny PC is increasingly likely to be a Linux based machine, which saves £110 which can go towards a more expensive graphics card. And I get full control over the machine, without Microsoft changing stuff on their whim, usually without making sure that it’s actually a positive change.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a chestnut coloured cat looking down into an open PC box. The captions are "The doohickey has uncoupled from the thingamabob." and "Bring me the duct tape"

Enough about the bad bits though, what am I looking at getting ?

The core upgrade will be the Ryzen 7 9800x3d processor in probably another Asrock board. Meltdown’s Ryzen 5 3600 has been rock solid in its Asrock board (after I disabled the overclocking that earned it the Meltdown name), so I’ll stick with that combination. This should be maybe double or the more the cpu grunt that Meltdown had. We’ll see.

I’ll drop 64GB in there (in 2 sticks of 32GB) which is honestly excessive … but it future proofs the machine a bit more. I’d like the Bunny to last at least 6 years preferably more, with the only changes done being graphics and possibly storage. I’m likely to acquire one of these boxes for it :

Picture. We're looking at a PC case. The frame is blue, with clear windows to front and one side. There are 6 fans spread around the case with lighty up bits.

That’s a Montech King 95 Pro. (Linky to Montech’s site) The advantages of that are the reports from people around the discords who have got one, it’s a very positively reviewed case. Meltdown’s Bitfenix case very nearly needed an application of the Mend Stick (hammer) to allow the PSU to be fitted, because it was supplied with a very small distortion. BAD. I won’t get the case with all the fans (maybe) but that one does have very key features – it can fit a very large air cooling fan, plus the ports are vertically on the front. A bit of learning from this case is that if the ports point upwards at all (Meltdown’s are at 45 degrees), they will trap dust and eventually not allow the plugs to go in properly.

The cooling is another direction where I have my own big opinions there … There are three main ways to go with cooling a gaming PC :

Air cooling – a big lump of metal attached to the processor with big fans to push air over it.

All in one cooling – a small waterblock goes on the cpu and moves the heat to radiators with big fans on to do the cooling. The whole thing would be sealed unit simple.

Home brew watercooling – same as above but this would be a lot more custom, where you figure out the waterblocks, the pumps, the filters, the radiators, the fans etc.

All in one and watercooling are both very well sorted now and I should probably check them out properly at some point but … I see the fans and ask if you actually really gain anything with these ? They’re more expensive, you have to consider the fluid inside (air bubbles get in, so the radiator goes at the top so the bubbles don’t go at the cpu part) and the chances of having a disaster where your expensive gaming PC gets drowned by its own cooling system.

Nah. I’ll just go for a big lump of metal and big slow fans. It’s less complicated, very little can go wrong with air cooling and it’s still very quiet if you go for the big slow fans. It’s one where opinions differ :-D. I go my way, I look at curiosity at those who go other ways, we see what we can learn from each other and mutually hope that we both get many happy gaming hours from our respective rigs.

That’s one for the rest of life too – respect each other’s choices, cheer people on and support them in the direction they go.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at the cats inside the PC again, this time the captions are "Keep calm and let the professionals do their job"

Note I won’t be going to a shop for the PC again. I’ll buy off the shelf laptops but … there’s too much potential for off the shelf desktops to have components in from OEMs that I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Or they’ll put substandard components in to save pennies, like an under specified power supply that will explode after 12 months and a day (warranty period) and take other components with it.

Oops, small eek there as I leant on the arm a bit too heavily and nearly provoked a bigger ouch.

There we go – if you’d like more of a look at what I’m lining up to get, here’s a Partpicker list link. The actual bits I get will diverge from that a little, so I’ll transfer the 2TB SSD from Meltdown and its expansion card over to Bunny. Plus I think I’ll transfer the graphics card over for the near term too, because the graphics card market is in a big state of flux right now, so it’s not a good time to buy.

(Plus politics is happening, you see too much of that everywhere else though)

Picture. Meme. We're looking inside an opened PC again. There is a cat in the bottom right. The captions are "I'm in your PC" "stealing all your memez"

I’m not ordering tonight part because it’s getting late, part because I try and avoid spending big money when I’m feeling the pain at increased levels. The other reason is that I need to transfer over all the data I want to keep to the 2TB drive that’ll go into Bunny PC.

That might take a while ! So many memes !

Nite all see you all at a later date :-).

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Time to resurface

by Sleepypete

March 31, 2025

9:32 pm

Comments Off on Time to resurface

events, games, musing

geeky, hiatus, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dice tray with rainbow coloured dragons flying.

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

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

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

A pink 3d printed dragon from Printing Like Rabbits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great evening everyone.

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

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Insert Meme Title Here

by Sleepypete

January 16, 2025

10:54 pm

1 Comment on Insert Meme Title Here

musing

geeky, meme

Hello everyone 🙂

Oh dear that’s a bit of a weak title innit … Couple of memes caught the eye this week that I thought would make an excellent theme for things to have a natter about. But first … thumbnail !

Picture meme. We're looking at a black and white cat that is sitting up. There is a loading wheel above their head and the caption is "Pls be patient, his brain cell is loading."

I think I broke my brain a little bit today. It’s a work related thing where we’re looking how we can add one bit of equipment to a bigger bit of equipment but it’s not entirely obvious how best to do it. So I started thinking about the problem in an abstract way. Ask not what the obvious solution is, ask what the problems actually are and what you’re trying to achieve. And you may end up with a completely different answer to what everyone has assumed the answer should be.

Actually that cues me up for a mini rant … I bet you’ve all been subjected to websites that are massively overkeen to get you to sign up for their cookies and especially their surveys or their newsletters. I had a suggestion to do that here, where one of the third party people were recommending I use that newsletter popup.

Nope. I hate that. It’ll never appear here.

You know the one I mean, where you’ve mostly randomly found a news site (often techie geeky stuff) and as soon as you move the mouse off the window, you get a popover that obscures the article that’s demanding you sigh up for a newsletter. If any website owners are reading this, PLEASE don’t do that. It’ll make random readers annoyed with you for having to dismiss the newsletter pop up and if they’re annoyed, they won’t ever sign up for updates. Whether or not someone signs up for a newsletter depends entirely on the quality of your content. If their first impressions are tainted by having to click too many links to dismiss cookies, or by a newsletter popup, then that first impression is pure annoyance and the first impressions stick.

Think of how you see the websites you look at, then apply what your impressions are to creating the style of your own site. And I have to admit to being a little bit lazy there myself with how I’ve got this site set up. It could be better, at least I hope it’s not annoying.

Because annoyance overrides being interesting. Put that newsletter or subscribe link at the end of your post. If someone’s enjoyed reading what you’ve contributed, that’s the point where you want them to see the “would you like to see more?”

Rant complete 🙂 First meme of the day is a question that a good friend on Bluesky asked. What would the title of your autobiography be ? I had a ponder on this for a minute, looked away for a second, had a random moment of inspiration and …

Picture. Cartoon strips. Top left, a red dragon is saying "Here to slay me? With that little thing". Top right, an armoured man holds up a sword saying "Oh, no I needed this to get here." Bottom left, a conical mountain with captions "I thought you'd be lonely up here so I'm here to sit with you, if you'd like". Bottom right sees man and dragon sitting quietly beside each other looking at the sunset.

I got that from Google images from probably a collections site but I might look up @Beardedhorse there for more. Ah ha ! Cool, they’re on Bluesky.

ADHD Brain says “stay on topic”, the daft idea I had was that my autobiography would be titled “Here be dwagons.” What would yours be ?

Next meme … if video games cause violence, what would you be going to prison for based on the last game you played. I’m not counting Idle Champions there, I’ve played Motorsport Manager today but when I answered that meme, the answer was “Running a sweatshop style factory impriso—- employing hordes of adorable little gnomes to build products with no thought for safety”. Yep, it’s the rather special Little Big Workshop.

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We can see the rooms of our factory laid out before us, filled with little machines and small gnome people with Xmas hats. In the centre, a box with a bearded fellow in red hat and blue waistcoat thanking us for delivering items to make the festive season happen.

There we go, that’s from the end of the Xmas event that the game has at a particular time of the real world calendar year. It’s a cracking game, very addictive with definite “one more job” tendencies to keep you sucked in playing the game.

Last meme was about games that you have and own in the Steam library but have never played … I have to admit to having more than a few of these. Sometimes it’s because I just haven’t gotten round to trying to learn them. Let’s see a few of these highly regarded games that I really need to have a good look at :

Puffin Planes has 5 minutes – it’s an airline management game where you’re looking to encompass the globe with your airline taking people from place to place. Just haven’t felt the Brain to learn to play it.

Sky Haven is an airport management game where you build your airport. I did enjoy setting up Airport CEO but didn’t have Brain to learn this one at the time.

Dustland Delivery – post apocalyptic truck game. You’re not driving the truck like the Euro Truck Sim / American Truck Sim games, it’s more a strategic transport game.

Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper – they’re both farm type games, with Graveyard Keeper having you manage sending the dead off. And harvesting them for bits to make other things. These are both legendary standard games that I really should invest some time in to learn.

Space Crew was a freebie and I added it to the library for the soundtrack. It’s a follow on to Bomber Crew (which I did own and look at) but didn’t play it because the gameplay videos and reviews I saw for it suggested that it was a bit of a soulless grindy hard for the sake of it game that I wouldn’t enjoy. And it doesn’t have the nostalgic connection to WW2 that Bomber Crew has.

Kenshi – is a post apocalyptic wasteland game where you roam with a small band of warriors trying to carve out your place in the world. I really should play this one, it’s a unique one with its own special character.

Papers Please – another legendary one where you play the part of an Immigration and Passport Control Agent in the totalitarian authoritarian country of Arstotzka. You decide whether people are allowed in or not and they’ve included enough weird character to make this an interesting cult classic.

Parkitect, Project Hospital and Model Builder – these all arrived in the same bundle as Little Big Workshop.

Humble is responsible for a lot of the unplayed games in my library, because I’d add the games I acquired as part of a bundle but wasn’t actually interested in.

Last one for today – Disco Elysium is another legendary game. It’s a mostly text adventure game set in a future scifi world that’s descended into neglect and dystopia. There’s a lot that’s very familiar to what we have in our 21st century world, with more advanced technology mixed in. But it’s not about the technology, it’s about a murder, an uncaring city, a long suffering partner and a cop charged with figuring out what’s going on at the same time as piecing together who they are from the fragments of extreme amnesia.

It’s another classic. I really must find the time to play it !

I need to get my daily at least one chapter read now though, so I’ll bid you goodnight, have a wonderful timezone everyone.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Winter wonderland, for a day

by Sleepypete

January 11, 2025

10:15 pm

Comments Off on Winter wonderland, for a day

Uncategorized

picture, weather

Hello everyone,

We had snow ! It’s always a big event that in UK because it’s quite rare. Although maybe it’s increasing as the weather gets wilder ? It didn’t last long but it was good to have a little wander in it while it lasted. Still chilly here … but the occasional clouds aren’t turning to rain or snow.

Thumbnail pic ?

Picture. Meme. We're looking at 4 panels all of a black cat with large eyes. The panels steadily get closer to the cat. The captions together say "I wish your year is full of nice things"

There we go. Purr.in.ink are good people and I must check that I’m following them on Bluesky if they’re over there yet.

Uhoh this could be a random post – quickly on the social media stuff … I’ve given up on trying to keep up with Facebook and Twixxer. I’ll occasionally scroll through the Facebook stuff but it is very occasional. Their algorithm is complete garbage now and hides things. I don’t bother scrolling Twixxer any more, definitely not on mobile due to how advert heavy it is. Plus both Facebook and Twixxer are run by … well you’ll have your own opinions there and I probably agree with most of them. It doesn’t help that both of these sites are now deeply problematic with who runs them.

Bluesky is great for keeping up with that selective curated group of people that I follow, as is Instagram. Plus I’ve trained Instagram to mostly suggest cute dog meme videos that it shows me when the people I follow haven’t posted an update. Good times.

Snow ?

We didn’t get much, although it was enough to cover up the roads with a light layer that was giving some people a few issues.

Picture. We're standing on a lightly snow covered pavement looking down a long straight road lined with lit streetlights on the other side. The road is covered in snow with ruts cut into it by the cars.

About enough snow there to make things interesting on the roads but it was a Saturday evening, so not many people were needing to head out to go to work or get supplies. Roads were pretty quiet actually and I think one of the local chippies were closing up early.

It was nice having the little walkabout. Not too cold and the snow was easy to walk through in the boots. I didn’t see any snow people about though and I didn’t stay out for that long.

Picture. Snow scene again. We're looking towards a small bridge. There is a wooden fence on each side, going up to about hip height. Beyond, the leafless branches of a layer of trees.

We did have the last remnants of the Christmas lights though.

Picture. Snow scene. We're looking down a lightly snow covered lane between houses, some of which we can see on the right with cars parked in short driveways in front. The screen is lit by streetlights and light blue white dot lights on the trees.

Pretty.

It’s taken me a few more days than I wanted to post this one ! Back at work this week and that usually leads to me being absolutely wiped out by the time it gets to the evening. (Especially as I did Mall on Monday evening and got back a bit late) So I’ve been gaming, with the trucks and a bit of Mass Effect, chilling out with the stream watching and enjoying the reading.

First book read of 2025 was Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s the last of his Architects trilogy, set in a fairly near future universe where humanity reached the stars only to find monsters lurking in Unspace* which would come out and remake planets as works of grotesque art. *(Unspace is this universe’s faster than light travel mechanism). It was a great trilogy with lots of shenanigans and characters to enjoy and the author pulled off the ending really well.

Next up is Colony Mars Four Jezero City by Gerald M Kilby. It’s started out as a murder mystery set on near future Mars. They’re not as well written as the Lords of Uncreation trilogy but they’re still an enjoyable tale. We need these books as well as the masterpieces. And some of the really well written books can be really boring and dreary to read.

I’d prefer to dive through a bunch of great stories that pull me in quickly, than to slog through something I’m not enjoying. And I’m looking at the Peter F Hamilton book from last year there, I enjoyed part of that set up but could tell it was about to go into very dark places with very little narrative support for it going to even deeper dark places.

Oh ! Gotta get back to the book (and the ShoxxyQT* stream) so I can keep a Kindle reading streak going that’s over 400 days now. The last time I missed a day was on the return home day of the Norway cruise, which had a nightmare drive home through almost central London on a really bad traffic day.

*Shoxxy is a new find in the streaming world, she’s a Scottish streamer lady who I’ve seen a small number of streams from so far. Lovely person, has very cosy chill vibes and it makes me happy hanging out in streams like that. Here’s a Twitch link. Although it’s more disturbing horror vibes from the game she has at the moment :-D.

Back to the book ! Nite all, have a lovely rest of the weekend.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Happy New Year everyone

by Sleepypete

December 31, 2024

9:54 pm

Comments Off on Happy New Year everyone

Uncategorized

new year, picture

Hello everyone,

It’s been a week since the last post already ? Gosh, kinda lost a few days there maybe :-). I thought I’d do a review of the year today, which has been inspired by something that the lovely Batkitto put on her discord (there’s a Twitch link there which has the rest of her links)

This year started as it finished, with us being a bit worried about the old mum. She’s doing ok and it was good to get up there for a couple of days over Xmas.

Bats’s post was about pictures, so let’s see … what’s our thumbnail today ?

Picture. We're on the cruise ship, in an open area. We're looking across the deck towards the horizon. The sun is setting behind a bank of cloud, giving off a lovely yellow glow. Our red dwagon is looking at it from a position on stacked sunbeds.

There we go. Kinda the wrong end of the year to start with but it was an excellent pick of a pic for the thumbnail. The cruise was good fun, relaxing, healing and I think it was just what I needed for that time of the year. I’d had a break previously into Wales but lost the benefit of that due to probable covid. I actually had a few away breaks through the year too, with occasional days at things like Insomnia and Creator North and Wales. More on those later. And more for the cruise in later posts too, I still owe three port visit posts there :-D. It was a wonderful time (except the Bay of Biscay crossings!) and we were looked after really well by the crew.

And there were day trips too …

Picture. We're looking over a metal fence towards a castle. On the right is a wooden bridge ending at a gatehouse flanked by two thick round towers.

I did a big camera upgrade this year to the Canon R50 :-D. And then proceeded to take it to various castles to have a nosey around and get loads of pictures of castles for people. The one above is White Castle in the midsts of hilly Wales. I’ve also been across to Chepstow, Caerphilly, Cardiff castle, the remaining wall of Carmarthen (which also saw me acquire a tripod upgrade) and then the North Wales trip took me to Conwy and Caernarfon.

It was good to be out and about taking pictures and seeing what it could do. Time for an honest opinion … Is it worth spending all that money on a fancy camera these days ? It all you’re looking to do is take selfies and relatively close range shots, no. Mobile phone cameras these days are filled with incredible optics for their size, it’s easier to get the pictures out of them (the R50 is easy but it’s still an extra step) and the software in the phone allows for incredible performance in unexpected ways. Like I left the good camera in the cabin later on in the cruise because the phone in night mode is fantastic for astro photography … with the software making a tripod kinda redundant.

Picture. We're looking towards a red dragon perched on a low wall. A medieval building is in the background.

Castle ! This time in Cardiff with the dragon there. I’ll look to find myself in Cardiff at some point this week, probably Thursday because everything will be closed up tomorrow. It was nearly today, although that went out for two reasons – I couldn’t get to sleep last night which meant I didn’t wake up and be active early enough today and the other reason is that my eyes are bad again … I might need to invest in new pillows and pillowcases there because I think those might be causing me problems.

One road trip that did happen was the yearly pilgrimage over to Lords for the Interservices T20 cricket. We lost half of the play to rain but the games we had were fun to watch. It’s not the best standard of cricket but the players put everything they have into the games and they’re well matched even games that could go either way, often hinging on really close moments in the game.

Pictures. We're looking a 2 stacked pictures, one above the other. Both pictures have a batsman in light blue top, black trousers and a fielder in red top black trousers and an umpire in black and dark blue, with a hat and green shoulders and arms. The two pics are as the ball is hitting the stumps and the fielder reacting below.

That was me playing with the longer lens I have, plus also playing with some of the options in the camera. The above had it in continuous shots and it let me capture the run out. Really happy with how that one turned out, not so happy with the editing I did 😀 (There’s a rogue line upper right). This is where the expensive camera comes in handy, it allows for much longer zoom lengths with different lenses.

But a huge highlight for me this year was the events that I was at with other people … Starting with Insomnia :

Picture. We're looking upwards at two people on a stage. The one on the left is a gentleman in white shirt, grey waistcoat and dark trousers, holding up a microphone in his right hand. To the left is a powerful looking lady barbarian with red hair, holding up her right hand in a fist, with a huge hammer in her left.

That’s Ragedarling, of Session Zero, playing as her barbarian character in the live action D&D show run by Josh Strife Hayes there in the picture. I massively enjoyed Insomnia back in March, it was lovely to run into Miyukipanda touring the halls, to watch the highly entertaining Session Zero show with Ragedarling and …

Picture. We're looking up at the stage again. The gentleman is on the left, Rage the barbarian is sitting on a couch behind and the new character being introduced is Sorceress Trixx. She's a tall, thin lady in a flowing black and purple dress with a fancy bodice. She's holding a staff with her right hand while holding up her left hand in a wave.

… There’s Billietrixx there playing Sorceress Trixx in the show. Twitch link there again. It’s been fun catching Billie’s streams and it’s been lovely being part of that community over this year and last since … finding Billie through the wonderful Tashnarr, who was a big part of making Insomnia such a wonderful experience.

They come together to be the faces of the Creator North events as well and it was good to be able to get up to Sheffield for the second of these in September this year. Looking forward to the next one of those already. It’s run by the remarkable LookItsTilly who moderates in the background for Billietrixx and Tashnarr with Maddog there being the final member of the organising crew. It was lovely being adopted by NinjaSpaceUnicorn’s little posse for the day too, that made it all the sweeter.

Picture. We're looking at a white saucer with an appetising looking brownie on it. Behind and right is a dwagon with an apron saying "Feed Me". In front there is a blue ribbon with white and orange lettering saying "Creator North 2024".

It was fun times, although I was suffering at the time with the extreme tiredness which was shared by a lot of people there plus I may well have done a minor dislocation on the shoulder again at the start and … probably picked up covid again. The shoulder is still attached, although I don’t think it went back in right, it’s still sore. What happened ? Someone got my attention to my left, so I turned … or at least my body turned and the arm stayed behind. Ouch.

Picture. We're looking out from the top of Mount Snowdon in Wales. There is a rocky, grassy outcropping in front of us and beyond that, valleys and hills covered in wisps of mist.

And then I have a little away time in North Wales with trips to Conwy Castle (where Ellardy the Little Red Dwagon happened), Caernarfon Castle and up Mount Snowdon by the railway.

I missed an event ! (Translation – got sidetracked). It’s always a highlight getting to MCM Comic Con in May with Comic Con Friend. It was the first time we’re been able to go to this since 2019 and a pandemic happened. There are more pictures from Comic Con in the post (linky). It was lovely to see Comic Con Friend again, we had a great day out there with lots of wonderful cosplay to see and loot to check out and it was awesome to catch up again. And I think CCF appreciated having a chance to catch up with the messages while we were on the way to/from London too while listening in to the playlist I’d hastily popped together (and then ran out of !) before.

Events are a little congested in May next year but MCM is something that’s on the definite list. I picked up a couple more ideas from peeking at Trayed and Tested‘s update on their Etsy site, like Megacon (London in Jan) and UK Games Expo (end May – NEC). Wait, didn’t I mention loot ?

Picture. We're looking at a crystalline rainbow coloured dwagon wrapped around a large dark green d20. The background is light blue, they're on a pine colour wooden desk.

Gosh, this is turning into a long one. It felt good to be blogging regularly again through December with advent, you’ll see the picture I posted into Batkitto’s discord in the post before this one. I’d missed the posting but with the burn out continuing, plus putting everything into work … I wasn’t feeling like opening the writing up again in the evening. Kinda like I’d spent the brain power through the day and wanted to be robot in a game or soaking up a good book while watching a stream in the evening. So the blogging went by the wayside there.

There have been many books ready too this year, Kindle tells me that I read 32 books this year although it only counts multibook packs as 1 each for the whole series. So the actual is probably 40. I think I’ll summarise those in another post. Games have been fun this year too, I’m close to picking up Star Wars Outlaws in the Steam sale, that was an excellent game.

Picture. We're on the ship, looking out over the side. The sky is mostly clear, with cloud to the left. Brilliant sunshine comes from near the horizon. We can see the rail of the ship below. We're looking out over the sea, broken up by light waves.

Time to wrap up though, on this post and on the year. It’s been an odd year. There’s been the massive highlights from the events and seeing much loved people again or for the first time. It’ll be good to continue that into 2025 and see about getting to more events. It’s been a rough year on that front too, with events closing down and jobs in the gaming industry going that the streaming people depend on.

Hopefully you’re all back here reading a similar post at the end of 2025. What adventures will we get up to ?

I hope to share at least a few of mine with you, either on here … or maybe in person ? We’ll see. Looking forward to seeing you <3.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Advent day 24 just checking in

by Sleepypete

December 24, 2024

7:13 pm

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advent

Hello everyone,

Just another quick one today. I’ve made the trip up to see family … good to see people again, although bugs are going around again so won’t be able to see everyone this time around.

What’s behind the door ?

Picture, we're looking at the complete advent collection with the snow scene in the background. The latest one is at the back on top of the d20. It's a flat spaceship with a red body and large wings, with white trim.

I’m just snatching the chance to pop in this last of the advent series posts while the dinner prep is starting. Great to see sister again, mum is back home as well which is a big relief.

(The model is from the obscure Young Jedi Adventures series, bit of an odd choice for the finale model of this set but it’s a decent looking ship)

Time to hit the post button but not before acknowledging that it’s felt good to be blogging so regularly again, even if a few of the evenings have seen the post rather forced out from behind a wall of worry and or just basic pain and sometimes both over the last week.

I haven’t preplanned how the posts will go this time, it’s just been a fairly random choice of subject from what’s been happening on the day or evening. Or it just lurches sideways from the first intent to something rather different. Just remembering back to a series on the old site at least 4 years ago, the Elitecember series was a good one and did see me preplanning lots for it (part because I needed to be in game to acquire screenshots where required) but I think that time it rather burned me out on both sketching and blogging.

I’ll attempt to avoid that burn out again, while posting a bit more regularly. It was a really good habit to be in and I hope people have enjoyed the happier posts, sympathised with the unhappy ones and that you’ve liked the pictures coming through.

Have a lovely festive time everyone !

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a close up of the head of a dog. They're a white dog with a dark nose that is absolutely covered with little dots of hundreds and thousands cake ornamentation. The captions are "Christmas Cookies?" "No, I haven't seen any Christmas cookies"

See you in a few days.

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Advent day 23 and we’re speeding along

by Sleepypete

December 23, 2024

10:00 pm

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musing

advent, musing

Hello everyone,

I’m having a bit of a curl up and not be particularly human day today, so I’ve pretty much hidden in Little Big Workshop and quietly lurked in a couple of streams with not too much source of input going on.

Hold up, what’s behind the door today ?

Picture. We're looking at most of the advent collection again. Our dwagon is on the right, the new model is on the left on top of the d20. It's an open top hover vehicle, with a sandy colour curved front and darker brown at the back. Two dots for figures are behind an aero screen. At the back, three engine pods to left, right and upper.

There we are, it’s the speeder from the first Star Wars movie. And today’s dodgy shift from picture to text is … (drumroll)

This year feels like it’s been speeding along … The time seems to have flown by but it’s also felt like an exceptionally draining year. A lot of that is stuff from behind the wall. Some of it is, you know I’m very wrapped up in the streaming and gaming community world and consider a lot of them friends. Insomnia was a brilliant event at the start of the year and the failure of the company that ran Insomnia hit especially hard, I think because the discontinuation of the event had a massive impact on the lives of those friends from the online communities.

That’s from the people who ran the event (hello Tashnarr), the people who were employed on stands at the event, the people (hello Billietrixx) who were the core of bringing us such a massive highlight in the Session Zero live dungeons and dragons show, people like Aby of Trayed and Tested who … I bought dice at Trayed and Tested and nowhere else at Insomnia because Aby was such a lovely person on the day (link to Etsy on the right).

I think I’ve mentioned before that I tend to mirror people when they interact. If they are lovely people, I find it much easier to engage with them. If they’re … not nice, I’ll find myself somewhere else to be. I’ll enjoy staying around people with the good vibes.

And the interesting people too. Interesting people are fun to be around. What defines interesting ? Not sure there. It’ll be something unique to that individual.

I think that’s enough from me for today. Not quite sure what I’ll be up to over the next few days, we’ll take it one day as a time and hopefully have a little fun family gathering. And then I’m back to trying to disconnect and chill out before we all head back to work in a week and a bit.

Have a lovely evening everyone 🙂

Oh ! Back to events for an epilogue … I somewhat decided last year that I probably wouldn’t be going back to Boatlife in 2025 but I did peek at what was happening yesterday, to discover that it too was an event that had gone in the bin. Not sure about the circumstances there, it felt like it could have been a really good event. Although the reason I thought I wouldn’t be back was because I thought the exhibitors had evolved into overgrown tenders and away from the workhorse liveaboards that I’m interested in.

I think that if Boatlife can fail as well, with it being run by NEC’s own events company, then it shows how rough the events world is at the moment. Which makes the very promising Creator Events group even more important for keeping the fun alive.

Definitely that’s it for me now – have a great rest of your day and if you’re out of contact for whatever reasons (good and bad things happen this time of year), I hope it’s a positive time for you.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?