Sleepypete's Pillow

Another meme sighted ! This one is :

You have to pick 7 films for a marathon all-nighter, but the rules are: 1) the films must be franchise films & 2) all 7 films must be from different franchises.

Let’s see. What can we come up with from that one. Oh and you know already that a lot of these are going to be scifi don’t you ? I’m totally ignoring that must be franchise film rule by the way.

First up is the inevitable Star Wars film, it’s Rogue One.

This was an incredible film when it came out with a compelling storyline that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe. The characters really sprung to life and made you feel what they were going through. The visuals were incredible. The digitally resurrected Tarkin was utterly chilling.

Next up is Passengers, a love story set on a space ship in the reasonably distant future. A small cast … but there is great interplay between the two leads. There’s great drama and …. a tear or two were genuinely shed while watching this movie. Oh and you gotta watch the gag reel in the extras especially for Jennifer Lawrence’s incredibly filthy laugh. I suspect she had huge fun with this movie.

Time for a super hero movie and I’m picking Thor Ragnarok. This is one film that definitely didn’t take itself seriously at all. I was head bopping to Led Zep’s Immigrant Song right at the start and there was a bemused grin on my face all the way through watching it at the cinema. Twice.

A film I haven’t watched for ages is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Actually it’s a toss up here between this film and House of Flying Daggers. Crouching Tiger led the way here bringing this genre back to popularity and it was a stunningly beautiful story, cinematography and setting. And House of Flying Daggers continued and extended that.

Is that two picks or one ? I need to watch both again !

Number 5 is 2001 which was an incredible movie in its day. Bit boring perhaps but an absolute triumph for the visuals. The modelling work still looks great today.

Up at 6 is Pacific Rim. Another soft fluffy absolute FUN movie with big silly robots fighting sillier big monsters. This list had to have some daft fun in it and Pacific Rim definitely fits that for a movie I’d happily watch over and over again.

Last one will surprise many and I’d urge you to go see it if you haven’t. It’s the Handmaiden from 2016, a gorgeously shot and played film set in Japan. A nefarious scheme has been hatched to separate a young heiress from her money … But will it go as everyone plans ? This one kept me guessing all the way through and it was a delight to experience it. (Adult warning though – there’s some strong stuff in this one)

Honourable mentions go to the Matrix films. To Interstellar for a story that also got the tears at the end … but it suffered for the silliness that broke it’s scifi. I didn’t think I could add a Star Trek movie but Wrath of Khan, The Motion Picture and Insurrection are definite candidates. I thought Battle Angel Alita was a marvellous film this year, as was Spiderman into the Spiderverse.

I need to watch Studio Ghibli movies too. I loved Spirited Away when I watched it many years ago.

Hmm … any more ? I do have a sizeable dvd/bluray collection. The Riddick movies were excellent scifi.

And then there’s the Resident Evil movies, the Independence Day movies, Mad Max, Die Hards. Armageddon and Deep Impact (and Meteor). The Jurassic Park movies. Yes I’m trolling but you should definitely check out Troll Hunter as it’s a marvelous film too.

And I just looked over at the blurays and instantly spotted The Martian ! How could I leave that one out !

I’m pretty tired at the moment.

Soon. The run from Xmas to Easter always seems really long and that burns me out after a while. What I really should do is find a time around March time to take a week and rest up before More Things happen around Easter. This time around, work took me away on trips away for a day which were great (apart from the meeting day which was meh but had to be done) and I actually felt far more hyper after a couple of those than I have done all year. But that gets to the limit of my energy after a while.

That’s improving though, I think my general health is improving as my outsides improve. Probably due to being able to sleep a bit better recently.

What isn’t helping is multiple threats and worries, within and without. I won’t talk about those here. But they are weighing on my mind a lot.

While I haven’t been reading much lately, I was enjoying Embers of War and I really need to reopen that one. Similar with the drawing. I need to get the pad out again at some point and practice again. Because people seem to like the drawings.

Games have been dominating my downtime lately, both in watching videos of games and in the playing too. Oh and if you have Netflix, check out Love, Death and Robots. I enjoyed the first 6 of these. Well, maybe The Witness was a bit too weird but Three Robots was amazing as was “When The Yogurt Took Over” and Suits.

Let’s see … the Battletech campaign has been continuing with mechs stomping the opposition and the occasional tragedy on our side too.

Iceangel (yep, old name back) leads the company from her Highlander mech called Can Be Only One. Yep. I went there :-D. I have a melee specialist in the For Behemoth ready to get close, thump things and then barbecue what remains. That one was piloted by Quarterback, who was the latest casualty of optimistically trying to stay around when the best choice would be to eject and save the pilot.

You can take 4 mechs along, so the other two are the lighter (still heavy!) mechs of varying roles. Like the long range missile mechs of Storm Of Bees, Fuzzy’s Fireflies and Lurking Doom. There’s a couple of long range gun mechs in Elysian Fire and Rumbling Thunder. The idea is to engage at range while the heaviest mech runs in close to barbecue things. It seems to be working, although the AI doesn’t give you an easy ride and tends to pick on already wounded mechs. I do too, all’s fair in war and all that.

Here’s the fallen so far, including the daftest so far. Most of the pilots have been lost to shots to the head bit. Very lucky shots …

Poor Apex getting mugged on her first mission. I named a mech Apex Predator for that one but it was an ill fated mech too. There are also the Remember Behemoth, Rise Seneschal, I really need one for Medusa and the next big mech to be reclaimed will be something like Quarterback Sneak. The game does a decent job of having you keep an eye on your pilots. Glitch is great with random comments “Will there be bears?” and I actually feel bad about losing some. Medusa too, who returned from massive injuries, to get injured again in his next battle and then eating a head shot in the battle after that.

And then there’s mech names like Prickly Hedgehog and Bunnies. Sometimes the names come ! Sometimes the brain only has bunnies in it.

I also went back into Stellaris for the first time in a while. This was totally without mods to see about getting some achievements collected. The true target was 200 years of peace, which won’t come in this game. The two nearest neighbours keep declaring war, keep getting crushed and ….

My mob are in the south in the light green with a Heart symbol. They’re Fanatic Pacifists, the heart symbol seemed appropriate. The two belligerents are just to the North and North West but the big threat is the blue Swarm guys to the East. They’re a devouring swarm that is just as powerful as my race economically and …. they have an overwhelming fleet advantage. I suspect they will declare war while I’m fighting the two close AIs again and … the best course of action if they do will be to modify my species to make ourselves Delicious (yes, you can do that !) and throw ourselves on to the Swarm’s dinner table.

I have a Cunning Plan to get that 200 years of peace achievement. I’ll roll up a Devouring Swarm, eat everyone and put the game on fast forward for an hour or so.

Sorted.

Yep. Games have been fun again lately. Hopefully I can get my Skyrim game running again soon, as the latest patch did a massive number on all the mods I use. A stable game suddenly became very unstable and the mods wouldn’t link up between themselves. The Cunning Plan there is to delete everything and start again. The deletion happened at the weekend and I’ll put things back on at some point.

On leave next week though. I’m hoping to escape the house for at least a couple of days too ! Stow on the Wold is fairly close by and I remember it being a nice place to visit. It’ll be good to go back.

Be well everyone.

I’m pretty tired as I type this, so sadly no drawings to back it up but there does appear to be a few photographic bits of evidence that have been left in my wake after the latest rampage events.

I’ve had trouble with my insides for a good while. My insides make too much acid and that gets pretty uncomfortable. Especially when attempting to get to sleep.

(Last night was a doozy ! Both me and my mum had the fish at the pub and we were both affected by nasty cases of acid as we discovered this morning)

But. There is much to be said for taking a disadvantage and turning it around to your advantage.

In this case, I’ve been keeping it quiet but for the last few months I’ve been undergoing experimental gene therapy. I had a little foretaste of this after eating the garlic bread at Turtle Beach, burping and I’m sure a little bit of flame came out.

(credit – Ines-ka of Deviantart, see link)

Of my mouth ! Not the other end. That could have been bad.

But yeah ! It sounded like a great idea. Start with that excess hydrochloric acid that’s being made. Add something to liberate all that flammable hydrogen. It also helps if it makes something tasty. Salt is good and one half of that is Sodium. This video has a demonstration involving Aluminium. Sodium is really reactive though (think – explosive in water) so the gene docs had to make a few modifications so that I wouldn’t go the way of pigeons that have been fed baking soda laden bread. (Don’t do that folks)

We thought about Iron too and I do have a taste for Irn-Bru (made in Scotland from girders) but Iron isn’t quite reactive enough for what we wanted.

I’m getting sidetracked.

A few bits of gene modification later, a strengthening of the stomach lining, addition of a second stomach as a reaction chamber and some membranes behind my front teeth as igniters too and …

I breathe fire now. How cool is that !

Bit of a drawback when trying to put out the candles though. One of the Double D boys has a birthday today ! Happy birthday !

Picture credit – ZookieDragon of Deviantart again.

It’s great for the cooking too.

Maybe.

That totally wasn’t a horrible accident that happened during experimentation. Honest.

 I picked up more marshmallows too this weekend ! Totally looking forward to trying out the new abilities on those. It’s also a good way of disposing of the junkmail we all get too. Smoke alarm doesn’t like it but … smoke alarms are a bit rubbish anyway.

Totally.

One thing I’m not looking forward to are the cramps they warned me about. My metabolism was always a bit odd when it came to cramping and dehydration and salt balance. I’d like salt bomb myself into cramping by having too much salt on my dinner after running around. And that Sodium Chloride waste product from the hydrogen production could well lead to muscles that want to go bang.

I guess that just means lots of water or. Come to think of it …. Something more flammable to increase the flame effect !

YES. DEFINITELY.

I had nothing to do with that. Honest.

Another meme is doing the rounds ….

Top Ten Video Games of all time ! This one is supposed to be thought of really quickly, so I’m going to brain dump first and then you’ll see the filled in post eventually when I hit that publish button.

1. Elite
And its various incarnations over the years. I’ve played the original on the BBC B, Elite on the Atari ST, Frontier Elite 2 on the ST, attempted Frontier 2 on the PC (far too buggy) and enjoyed Elite Dangerous as well.

These games are an open ended dream, allowing you to set out on an alternate life as a space trucker, mercenary, bounty hunter or a mix of all that. And they all looked amazing in their day, with the latest game being perhaps the most beautiful game I’ve played.

2. Master of Orion 2
Ahhh, an oldie but a goodie. Think Civilisation mechanics translated into space, centred around stars with a planet to colonise and fleets of spaceships going all the way up to Death Stars to impose your will on the rest of the races of the galaxy. Perhaps a bit of a one trick pony with the races though, as it had a mechanic where you couldn’t have all of the technology unless you were Creative, so there were race picks that were massively overpowered. I hugely enjoyed losing days in this one until Stellaris came along.

3. Master of Magic
Another old classic. This one was again heavily inspired by Civilisation, however instead of human races with minor differences, this one had Humans, Orcs, Elves, Dragonpeople, Dark Elves, Trolls and more, each having far more major differences, advantages and disadvantages. This is a legendary game and I really must give Endless Legend another look as the most recent attempt at doing this type of game again.

Oh and one thing this had which was a major plus over Civilisation, there was a tactical battle layer in which to resolve the fights between your units and heroes. Civ never, ever had that. And your character could take an active role in your campaigns, with world altering spells on the strategic scale and the ability to unleash fireballs, lightning bolts and the apocalyptic flame strike in the tactical layer.

4. Revs

This was another game that really pushed the boundaries of what was possible on these first home computers. Revs was a game by Geoff Crammond for the BBC Micro back in the 80s which had you racing around old Silverstone in a Formula 3 car. It was amazing for its day and I loved playing it. There was later an expansion which brought more tracks and it was developed into the Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix series of games. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the original ideas were carried through to the F1 games of today.

5. Neverwinter Nights
This was a Dungeons and Dragons game from Bioware, which was their next game after the legendary Baldurs Gate 1 and 2. But whereas I bounced off the more acclaimed Baldur’s Gate games (and haven’t finished either), I was happily addicted to the less complicated but far easier to play Neverwinter Nights. The innovation here was to take the 2d isometric games into the 3d world, within the limits of what could be done at the time again. When I’d finished this game with one character, I was very happy to dive straight back into it with more characters to play through the game in vastly different ways. And then I did the same with the two expansions and the Player Race Consortium (or something other for PRC!) pack which added in all of the 3.5ed Prestige classes for even more variation.

6. Tie Fighter

Another Star Wars game from the mid 90s and another cracker. Whereas the original had you flying for the Resistance in an XWing, this one had you flying for the Empire in their mix of TIE fighters, bombers and interceptors. A fantastic game with a gameplay model which was immensely satisfying. It was superbly balanced between rewarding reflexes, introducing adrenaline and avoiding the frustration that games like this from that time could introduce.

The area where a lot of these games fell down on were missions which were just plain silly, which must have been designed as gateways to stop you completing the game too quickly. Missions with instant fail conditions or where the opposition was just plain daft. You’d play the mission perfectly but because some part of the AI did something silly, you’d fail and not be able to progress. This one was difficult … but still very possible.

7. Deus Ex Human Revolution
I was very happily addicted to this one when it came out. It didn’t do everything that games like even the older Deus Ex did but what it had, it did incredibly smoothly and accurately. The gameplay was tuned to perfection. And I enjoyed the storyline too, completing this game numerous times.

7.5 Mass Effect series
I nearly forgot this one ! How could I ! You play as Commander Shepard, an elite space marine who finds her(him)self on a crusade to save the galaxy from the implacable Reapers. Another classic from Bioware, although it’s a shame that ME3 and ME-A suffered from interference from the publisher and were rushed out before they were ready.

8. Motorsport Manager
I’d been after a good racing manager game for quite some time before this one appeared. It’s given me excellent chill out times while still being somewhat of a challenge to win. Your decisions have a genuine impact on how your people do in the race and it’s no cakewalk. However, the one criticism I’d have is that when you figure out the metagame of how to rapidly grow your team, your group will outstrip the competition in the space of a season or two and then the challenge starts to go.

9. UFO and XCom
These games have been going for years … decades ! The idea is that aliens have arrived to invade the Earth and your covert XCom organisation is the only thing standing in their way.

These games depend on a steady ramp up of difficulty where more advanced and deadlier enemies appear as your organisation researched the technology to match them and eventually figure out how to repel their invasion. Take too long though and the aliens will win and that’s curtains for humanity.

The original game had you starting with 10-14 soldiers, going up to 26 later. It had a sequel called Terror From the Deep and then XCom Apocalypse which added a real time mode. I hugely enjoyed Apocalypse but it did get grindy at the end. The less said about XCom Interceptor the better and then the series effectively died until the recent XCom reboot. The two newer games are excellent as well.

10. Starfleet Command
Lastly for this set is the Starfleet Command games. These were based on the tabletop Starfleet Battles game and is another set that I hugely enjoyed.

The first 2 games covered the Original Series Kirk era, with SFC3 moving to the TNG era. Whereas most of the real time strategy games of the time were based on basic hit points and other resources, this one was about single ships and put much more detail in there. Shields with recharge rates, power generation that had to be managed between systems and it was much slower and strategic.

The story based campaigns were excellent but it was a shame that the online Dynaverse system didn’t work too well.

Did I mention being able to customise your Star Trek ships too ? These were excellent games.

Honorable mentions go to :

Stellaris – took over from Moo2 as my space strategy game but the 2.2 patch has damaged it considerably.
Falcon 4.0 – I need to play more flight sims and greatly enjoyed this one. It had the combat elements, the flight elements and put them into a dynamic war campaign.
Star Wars Pod Racer – so close to being in the Top 10. Thrills and adrenaline and fun.
Defense Grid – a tower defense game with a dangerous high score system … The idea on these is that you have to set up the defense towers to beat back massive waves of enemies of increasing strength and the challenge is to keep enough in hand that you can stay ahead of what you need to stop them winning. I much preferred this one to the sequel.
Planetbase – a chilled out space colony builder game which suffers from very dumb colonist AI.
World of Warcraft – the open world exploration and questing is brilliant, with humour and fun all over the place. But it’s let down by the end game and the silly mechanics.
Battletech – I’ve been enjoying playing through the campaign again. The sad thing is, I know that it should have been better. There was a very solid table top game to build on and the stuff added by the developers just … isn’t very good. There is very little variation in the non story missions beyond “Drop and murder twice your strenght in enemies, repeat in next battle”.

That’s me list ! Crikey this one has gone on for a while.

Oh – small announcement – I’ve really enjoyed doing the April 1st posts over the last few years but I may well be skipping it this year. Brain feels melty, this weekend is going to be quite tiring and I’m not feeling the ideas I have so far. We’ll see if anything promising comes to mind over the weekend.

More random thoughts today !

I need to find some coherent themes for posts again. I’ve been struggling to find stuff to write about ! Also not drawn in a week either.

What’s been happening ?

Work’s been very busy, with me having good excuses to do some runs in the car to get to away trips. They’ve been mixed. Two trials were excellent, one was … mixed feelings and then there was a safety meeting. No one really likes safety meetings, although the alternative to not doing safety right is to have things happen with your kit like what’s been happening with Boeing’s 737 Max airliners lately. Nobody wants lives lost due to safety negligence to be on their conscience. I definitely don’t.

Oh eck, that was a bit of seriousness creeping in.

I help to support and test equipment that other people have to use later. I like to think that my efforts prevent other people from getting broken.

But yeah, getting out and about with work again has been great and the tiredness from long days (I’m 27 hours in credit on the flexi !) is being balanced from learning a huge amount on those away trips. Yep, I get a kick out of seeing what we deliver being used as we wanted it to be used and we deal with some quite unique exotic equipment.

Of course, that’s led to home time being either recovery from those long days out or concentrated chill out time. But …

Skyrim seems to have broken on me again. I run with a lot of diverse mods and the mods have either broken or stopped talking to each other … Oh well. This one is an odd one … Saturday was spent removing and reinstalling mods to try and fix it and I tried a reinstall of the game tonight, it’s more stable but those mods are talking to each other even less now. Ho hum.

Computers are weird. I actually observed one issue on the trial yesterday that could be closely related to why my home networking doesn’t work quite as intended here. Windows was never the most reliable thing.

Music wise and getting through the library, I’m approaching 3/4 through the library now. Only 4,745 songs (11.5 days) to go before I’ve listened to it all again. Getting there. The current album is Dreams, the greatest songs collection from the Cranberries. It’s a great album to listen to.

Back to that networking, I may have to get a new wifi router. I keep having to reset mine to keep things talking. I also got an email from my ISP saying that they’d changed the software on my cable modem. Without telling me. It’s supposedly doing more wifi tricks now, which I have specifically disabled because I don’t want the neighbours to be stealing my bandwidth via Virgin Media sharing my connection without my explicit consent. (The VM cable modem router is also really bad at rejecting interference of which there is apparently significant amounts around here)

Car’s doing great. And I have a suspicion that the last one had a broken power steering pump. The steering is much more fluid and smooth than in the last car. Oh and the front end has had suspension improvements too and lets you attack the corners with more confidence.

I’ve been losing days to Battletech as well. I’ve been rather enjoying playing that again, although I’ve hit that phase in the game where it gets pretty brutal. Bigger mechs appear with more weapons and it’s more likely that arms and legs get blown off your own people’s mechs.

Media ? I’m avoiding paying too much attention to the news because all of it just confirms what we’ve known for years. The people making the decisions in this country are utterly incompetent and self interested.

I’ve been really enjoying Star Trek Discovery again. The scriptwriters have been doing an amazing job of creating an exciting series with great characters where you have no idea what’s coming next. They’re borrowing ideas from old Trek, which is fair enough too and gives them scope for going straight to story with little introduction.

Ooo – feeling tired again now. I’ve given up on troubleshooting Skyrim for now, I’m probably missing something or missed reinstalling the mods correctly. It’s weird.

It’s videos at the moment with a HeyChrissa stream going on the laptop, music going to the hifi and game video catch up on desktop. I may pick up Embers of War again soon for more reading.

Last bit – odd phone stuff …

I picked up another charging lead on Monday so I could charge the phone in the car and … my original charging lead starts getting rejected by the phone with the claim “Stuff is moist, wait for it to dry out.” Very weird. It was fine to connect in the car yesterday although there’s weirdness with something called Mirrorlink. That’s supposed to allow the phone display to clone to the car display but … it just succeeds in locking out the phone and I can’t get anything on the car screen yet.

Need to disable that I think.

Closing out – tired definitely, needing some recovery time, definitely feeling burned out on the internet. But work has been having its moments and I’m taking the chance for some time off before Easter which should get me back to feeling good again. Outsides are definitely much closer to being fixed, although those last few bits to heal are frustrating.

PS Captain Marvel was a fun film to watch. Recommended !

Time feels like it’s going in a blur at the moment !

Mind you, last weekend was busy. Actually feel really busy at the moment.

Oh ! Thumbnail pic :

That’s the latest.

The hair is better. I’m still rubbish at faces. What’s on the skeleton needs work. I cheated on the bike wheels and pedals, plus the bike is not tall enough. (The bike is too long and shallow). I like the dog though. And it’s made people laugh. To get chuckles from people is the whole point of doing the drawing.

I’m steadily learning more about the Paint programme that came with the graphics tablet. I’m using a pencil tool to do the outlines, the hair highlights (and attempt at braids) and the freckles. The colouring is done via the airbrush tool. That’s one odd thing, the Painter programme is very much additive colour. Adding something on top of something else will change the colour of both, even if you’re working on different layers. That’s a big difference to GIMP, where something on a higher layer will cover up what’s below.

The Painter programme feels more natural to sketch in though, compared to GIMP.

Oh – this one was done at work last week after an incident where we lost our network connectivity.

Click for bigger as per usual. These were sketched in pencil over lunchtime (I had a longer than usual lunch in order to get that idea out of my head on to paper where it wouldn’t cause any trouble – ideas can be distracting). And then it was later digitised via the phone camera at home (hence the rubbish quality !) and you’ll probably detect where I was struggling with the paint tool in order to cover up the boomerang (supposed to be laptop!) that got turned into the keyboard and screen.

That’s enough of the pictures for now though.

Last weekend felt nuts !

Friday was spent having a quick wander through Cardiff on the hunt for music shops and other curious places. I didn’t find new music but I did find more sherbets. The sherbets have disappeared already.

I also learned to not attempt to escape Cardiff at 5pm on a Friday. You end up escaping Cardiff at around 6pm having not moved very much in the meantime.

And then I retreated my exhausted bones back home (via Sainsburys for a little recycling !) Ahh. Domestic stuff. Since I’ve been putting the plastic bottles in the recycling bins, my waste bin has needed emptying far less often by the bin men. The bottles used to go in there and they’re a decent amount of volume.

I may have watched 24 hours + of motor racing last weekend. The World Endurance Championship was a decent 8 hour race and the next day I was following the Lexus RCFs again in the 12 hours of Sebring at the same track. The two Lexuses decided to take bites out of each other though and didn’t repeat the promise they showed at Daytona.

And then there was the Formula 1. A decent season opener and it was good to see Valtteri Bottas emerging from out of the shadow. He had a really poor year last year. It’s sad to see what’s happened to Williams, from being up with the leaders, they’re now firmly at the back. You can pretty much expect who’s going to be fighting for the win in F1 but there’s usually a decent amount of interest down the field for what’s going on in the teams.

What else is going on – it was good to have the run in the car to Cardiff and back … and I’m getting longer shakedown runs later in the week too.

Random aside – it’s really sad to see the state of international cricket at the moment, he says after seeing yet another bowler resort to throwing the ball. Throwing has become endemic in international cricket. The door was opened with bowlers maybe 10 years ago getting away with the occasional throw … and now certain bowlers are doing it all the time. A blind eye is being shown. Dale Steyn was an incredible bowler when he started, now he throws the ball and is actually less effective for it. Lasith Malinga had a wonderfully weird slingy action when he started. Very round arm but definitely a beautiful example of how to bowl in a completely different way to how you are taught to. Now it’s like a javelin throw. It’s also less effective because the throwing means he doesn’t get the last instant boomerang swing any more.

And there are more in a similar vein too. It’s quite sad to see once great players have to resort to that either through injury or age. Bowling the ball means you can put a lot of spin on it, which stabilises it for seam movement and gives gyroscopic action which causes the ball to swing round corners if done right. Throwing doesn’t impart that spin on the ball.

I better stop whinging about that before the trolls find me !

Hectic couple of weeks coming up … then I’ll be escaping and chilling out for a week before Easter. Been feeling the need to take myself off somewhere and disconnect. The neurons feel a bit toasty. I do like to keep up with the various streams and communities though.

That’d be the fear of missing out ! Need to post more too 😀

A meme ! Haven’t seen this one before either.

At least, not before seeing it on Cyberkitten’s blog on today’s catch up. Here’s a link to his post and his list. I’ve had a quick peek but I’ll have a good look after I hit publish for this one. Don’t want to be led too much by it :-).

Ok. The meme is 11 fictional places that you’d like to visit. You’ll probably quickly guess what a few of these will be …

First up, as suggested by the thumbnail is the Federation of Star Trek. And the other assorted worlds and empires that make up the Star Trek universe. They created such a rich and varied universe in Star Trek and around the various war areas, it seems a great place to live in. A utopia. But it’s that richness that attracts one to Star Trek, there’s something new to see in every light year and the ability to travel to see it.

In more fantasy territory, there are the Dragonriders of Pern. These are from the books of Anne McCaffrey and it was a fantastic series until it kinda ran out of steam when it finished its main arcs. However ! It has dragons. It also has fire lizards, or miniature dragons. The books I liked the most were the Menolly books, where she escaped from her early life and found wonder in music.

Third one will be the Culture universe of Iain M. Banks. You’ll probably notice a theme where I’m looking out for the variety in the universe and the Culture is no exception. Humanity are overseen by Machine Minds, who take care of their whims. Humanity joins in with the ultimate variety via self modification. It’s most definitely a utopian society, however there are always things nibbling at the sides, threatening the integrity of that utopia. And then there are the Minds and the often irascible drones that are a vital part of this system.

Fourth up is the Belgariad world from David and Leigh Eddings. These books were amazing for their character interplay, which brought a huge amount of fun to the books. However, the books also form a journey through the diverse countries and cultures that make up this world. Always something new to see and fanatic cultists to avoid in case they turn their beady eyes to your chest and the heart within.

Let’s see. Babylon 5 has to be number 5. This was a very special series from the 90s and I was utterly glued to it throughout. This series was utter brilliance from start to finish. Threads were set up early that took seasons to develop. You had spectacular interplay between characters such as Londo and G’Kar. Susan Ivanova was an especially inspiring character. There was high drama, there was fun to break it up. It brought spectacular battles through innovative cgi. Hopeless battles and last ditch fights. Inner struggles and galactic wide conflict. This series was amazing, brilliant and I think I’ll be watching it again after I’m done with Stargate.

These next two will probably go together. I’m a firm fan of The Expanse, although I’m not too sure about where it’s going … It’s another rich world to lose yourself in although it’s perhaps a little too polarised between the various communities. A dream given form with ports where diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs and wanderers gather. All alone in the night A dangerous place but our last best hope for peace.

Oh wait … that quote is from Babylon 5. It’s the season 1 intro and it’s quite brilliant. Here it is voiced by Michael O’Hare who is sadly no longer with us. He had to leave the show due to severe mental illness, although his character Cdr Jeffrey Sinclair had a chance to return and complete his story. So many things about Babylon 5 were incredible and I would thoroughly recommend giving the series a watching.

Number 7 is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. These called out to me right from the start as a triumph for engineering, especially Nadia’s story as she’s setting up the first Martian city.

Hmm, what shall 8 be ? Larry Niven’s Known Space series is also an excellent example of diversity and wonder. But watch out for those Kzin because they’ll eat you. The Rimworld books are books I would heavily recommend.

Number 9 is back to fantasy and it’s a really dangerous place. It’s the Warhammer Fantasy universe with a planet inhabited by your classic fantasy cultures, with man split up into several nations, there are the dwarves and elves, dark elves across the ocean and a few other cultures and races dotted around too. Always something happening, usually weird, usually with influence from the portals at the poles of the world from which chaos boils forth, corrupting the land around. Another dangerous place but full of adventure.

I think Number 10 has to be the near future, as a mix of the various cyberpunk worlds of games like Shadowrun and Deus Ex. Everything is possible, everything is feasible … at a cost. These worlds dive into extreme modification and high technology with our minds breaching into the cyber world or being melded to cybernetic technology in the real world.

If the first is Star Trek, the last definitely has to be Star Wars. This is another galaxy of endless wonder and variety. There’s always something new to see, a new scam to run, a scheme to evade and something of wonder to find. I think I’d choose the prequel era to avoid the Empire or the Old Republic era of the games, which was set around 4000 years before the films.

That’s it for my 11, although honourable mentions must go to worlds like : Anne McCaffrey’s Brainships, Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon’s Sassinak series, the Honorverse from David Weber, Elizabeth Moon’s universe that started up in Hunting Party, the Forgotten Realms of Faerun, the grim dark future of Warhammer 40k, the multiverses of Heinlein and …..

How could I miss this one out :

I’ll make it 12 places and add the Discworld as the last one.

Friday was car day !

This means you need a picture ….

There we go. Old grey shiny and new red shiny. And me, showing them both up.

It didn’t quite go as per the original plan … I’m feeling the burn out exhaustion creeping up on me again, which is one reason why there haven’t been as many posts lately. I have my first week off of this year coming in the middle of April. Not too long to go. I’ll have to find some excuses to go to places.

Plan A was to head off into Cardiff but I emerged from the car place a little too late for that. I also hadn’t had any lunch because an unwelcome distraction at work needed stamping on. We’re organised into Functions and mine has just woken up to something in my profile that I want to avoid doing … I’ll be removing it from my profile tomorrow, it’s a skill thing which could pigeon hole me into a soul destroying dead end. I’m happy using that as a minor part of a main job, as I am at the moment but it’s an area of non-engineering that I’m looking to avoid being dead ended into. However the functions think they can move people around to suit the whims of people demanding that other people be found to meet gaps they can’t normally recruit into.

It’s a really bad system and it’s causing massive retention issues.

Anyway …. car ! Here’s another angle :

The red works well.

The spec between old and new is pretty close. I have had a couple of upgrades though in a Protection Pack which includes parking sensors (very nice, I’d missed those), something shiny and chrome and some bits to protect the boot.

I think there are a few other small upgrades as well.

Plan A was to head off into Cardiff for some shop wandering and while I was at it, take some pictures of the car at the viewing spot by the Severn Bridge. Rain intervened with the bridge pics and I’d have arrived at Cardiff at about 4.30, just in time for traffic mayhem and with no time to bimble before the more interesting shops closed up.

But I did get a picture by a bridge :

So shiny you could see your face in it ! Maybe not. But if you look really close, there’s a reflection of a me in that picture … And the Avonmeads bridge behind it.

The travelling (including lunch at the really nice Gloucester services and a raiding of their farm shop) got me to Avonmeads just in time for the Lego Movie 2 which …. was still fun. Maybe not nearly as inspired as the first movie but still a lot of fun to watch.

That was pretty much me toasted for the weekend though, got back in time (via the supermarket !) to watch a great England thumping of the West Indies in the cricket. Definitely enjoyed watching that.

Oh and …. cake ?

Need more cake. (And the dwagon needed bigger legs !)

I’ve been in the games a little bit again as well, I dredged up an old save in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 (Kotor 2) yesterday and enjoyed bimbling around that. It feels incredibly linear compared to the first game though. Odd. There’s a lot more shades of grey in this one though compared to other Star Wars games.

Need to have a look at Mutant Year Zero too, which arrived courtesy of Humble Bundle. It’s another tactical style game.

But before then … Roll4it has their Stargate Horizons finale tonight, there’s more Eng vs WI T20 and I’m looking forward to a bumper weekend next week where it’s :

World Endurance Championship at Sebring on Friday night (I’ll record this and watch it Saturday);
Formula 1 is back in Australia (same with recording to watch at a more hospitable time)
And the finale of the Six Nations. It’s looking like a Wales Grand Slam this year … unless Ireland stop them.

Later !

My mind seems a little fried still at the moment !

The bugs from last week must have had a bit of an effect. I’m still feeling the effects with a cough that isn’t going away. (Feels like something stuck in the back of my throat being ticklish).

Hot chocolate helps.

That’s a mk2 version of the Dwagon Pushes Coffee mug from last week. One of the streamer people who I occasionally watch is called Avery, aka Littlesiha (Twitch link). She’s usually to be seen playing Just Dance and bopping along to it. She hopefully has as much fun playing and dancing as it seems on screen. Anyway, I thought I’d modify the mug to be a dancing Avery lady mug :-).

Still learning. I’m probably overcomplicating the drawing still as you can do some amazing things with simpler line art. Here’s a childhood child favourite :

I don’t rate his chances. That’s from Calvin and Hobbes by the brilliant Bill Watterson. Check out his stuff.

But you look at what actually constructs that scene and the artwork is surprisingly simple. And very precise. I’m missing precision still.

But I’m having fun with it now that my brain seems to want to get back into drawing again after the bugs.

Anyone for pizza ? I’d like a bit of pizza.

Maybe Friday. That’s the big day for car changing and it needs a little preparation … which I think I’m pretty much there on. Hopefully won’t forget anything this time. Let’s see :

Registration document – got it;
Insurance all changed – sorted;
Extra key – found;
Blingy valve caps – gotta switch those (I use basic plastic ones because kids steal the metal blingy ones and set the alarm off)
Work car park pass – to do, early next week. There’s no real rush here.
Empty all my rubbish out of the car – pretty easy because I try to keep things out of the car.
Can’t think of anything else there. I’ll wipe the car’s memory as well before doing the handover.

I want to find where I put my Pebble extra battery for the phone, I haven’t seen that since Roll4itcon in December. I suspect I’ve put it down somewhere and it’s been covered up by books.

That’s part of the plotting for Friday’s pick up day actually. Plan is to head up to Cheltenham to do the switch in the afternoon and then I’ll head back down the motorway with camera to take pics (and raid the fancy service station too). I’m planning to check out the viewing area for the Severn Bridges and then most likely, head into Cardiff for a wander.

Cardiff has books. Cardiff also has a Lego shop. (Mind you, Lego hasn’t brought out many kits that I’m interested in lately).

I’ll also undoubtedly pick up more music too as Cardiff has a few good shops for that as well. Film watching is likely too with Captain Marvel coming out this week. Should be good. I enjoyed watching XMen Apocalypse again on Friday evening.

My current book is Embers of War by Gareth L Powell and it’s intriguing so far. Santorini by Alastair MacLean was excellent, I’ll pop up a quick review of that one when I’ve drawn some Sleepy Does Cover Art for it.

One last one and then it’s back to the penultimate episode of Stargate Horizons :

Not sure if that one has worked so well. But I think he’s going to be enjoying those noms.

Been a bit under the weather this week …

The bugs hit on Wednesday and they felt really bad. I was still heading off into work but very definitely reduced capacity. Still not right but closer to normal again. It’s been the classic hot/cold with a dry cough but add crippling headaches and joint pain to that as well. The headaches were intense on Wednesday. (Meningitis did cross my mind, thankfully it wasn’t.)

It did mean I didn’t have a chance to play more with the new toy acquired on Tuesday though. Yep. Acquired a tablet … graphics tablet. It’s a Wacom Intuos thing which is purely input. There’s no screen on it but you can have it on your lap, keep your eye on the screen and it’s fairly intuitive linking the hand movement to the screen when you get used to it. (It seemed to be fighting me today though which could easily be Windows).

Anyway … I thought I’d try a sketch or two and this happened :

Click for bigger as per usual. I’ve been attempting to learn more from a group called Inklings, where the lovely pair of Steph (@sourfruitjunkie) and Aria (@genkisoda) have huge fun just drawing things while talking about the techniques that go into what they’re drawing.

One thing I’m taking from it is … there’s a huge amount of work that goes in before it becomes as apparently effortless as when an expert does an activity. As a beginner, you look at what you make and think it looks rubbish. You forget that there’s a massive amount of work and practice between the beginner and the expert. The thing to tell yourself is that by practicing, you’re making the steps to becoming much better and you should learn as much as possible from your early efforts and from watching other people.

There’s always room to learn. And it takes ages to get to an expert level. The underlying message though is that drawing is fun. Keep at it.

Here’s another sketch :

This one is for the lovely Random Tuesday who had a birthday last week. I was doing more learning about the brush tools available in the drawing package (still far from getting the best from them) and looking to apply some of the skeleton lessons. Everything has a skeleton (even dragons!) … and remembering that will make your drawings look a bit more real. So in here, I’ve used a pocket dragon as a reference again and added in customised arms and fingers to make the symbol on the middle. I hope she liked it.

The last one of the evening was for the weekly Mage Cast show, which has been huge fun to watch. One of the cast members has been busy doing other things for the last few weeks though. Where could he be ?

The original had lines which were far too faint, I hope the brightness adjustment makes it more legible. That’s another lesson to learn, my AOC screen is extremely good but I think it’s bringing out details that other screens cannot. Hence the one above having detail that’s too faint to read.

One of the issues I’m fighting with myself on is that I want to unleash the drawings as quickly as possible, before refining them to be up to good standard. I dunno, I get ideas that I think will make people chuckle and I want to get them the chuckles as quickly as I can.

One last sketch before closing thing … anyone need coffee ?

That one’s from coming back to drawing today. I’m trying to keep the style to simple outline with filled colours (I’m surprised at how many drawings and animations actually are simple outlines and flat colour!) with highlighting coming in as appropriate.

But yep. Felt more like drawing today after the bugs in the week. Maybe could have yesterday but I wiped myself out with stuff going on in the morning.

Car service trip up to Cheltenham and …
My cards were nearly wiped out by a bad reader in the petrol station (I may actually have flipped their PINs in my head, yep – bugs)
Scarily friendly receptionist. As in scary.
Distance travel. Not much but energy is very low still.
I’m changing the car again.

Yep. Lexus number 4 is on its way as part of an offer I couldn’t refuse (of the nice kind, not the Godfather kind). I think they’re terrified of Brexit and it’s led to an offer where :
I pay the same monthly amount;
It holds off the “what happens at the end of the period” issue where I have to either fund buying the car or let it go;
They’ll pay 3x services;
Massive deposit contributions – I’m basically not giving them any extra.
Possibly one for a disclosure note ? Maybe. The usual thing where disclosure is necessary is where you tell people how good stuff is without saying whether you were paid to say that. The incentives are all there above and I haven’t said anything why I’ll be on Lexus 4. (They’re fantastic, solid, reliable cars with great performance and spec – what’s not to like!).

The next one will be red and one reason to change is that while IS no 2 was better than the first, there were still a couple of thoughts like “It’s not giving the economy of the first” and an issue with the phone which I was a bit perturbed about.

More in a few weeks there. In the meantime, I can feel bug affected legs threatening a pain flare up so I’d better hit “post” and say bye !

PS Check out Inklings on Geekspace.tv (twitch link). One more session on Monday evening (Tues 0.00 GMT) in this current run but I hope they’ll be back. They’re fun.