Hello everyone,
I had a bit of a blur of a weekend which followed something daft that happened on Thursday. Let’s just say I had a daft idea and the means to make it happen.
People seemed to like that one, it didn’t take much time for me to make it happen. I think the juggle of phone camera and my pen torch light helped add a little spooky. (Timers are super handy for when you need a hand to hold the phone and a finger to press the picture button). Oh and I like Smarties too. It’s drawn a few lovely reactions which made my day when I saw them. I get the ideas in my head for pictures like that and it feels good when I can make them happen.
And then I hurt my back on Friday afternoon and that was Brain in a cloud of subconscious pain for the weekend. That’s a weird Me thing apparently. I wasn’t getting much actual pain from my back, so I must have just come short of seriously hurting it. But I could feel something pretty Wrong back there and I was getting the warnings. It’s like my subconscious could feel the issues from it and natural painkilling was stopping me from properly feeling it. But it was clouding my thinking.
It’s started to improve today, which is good. Plus my mental state at work is far better than it was last year. Mental state is pretty critical to the rest of your well being. (But I’m sure everyone knows that !) Mine goes up and down, I’m completely driven by confidence and that feels like it’s got some rungs to climb back up on.
Oh and boat show on Friday. That should be good. I just have to get myself over to it. Pictures will most definitely happen. The Brain Fog over the weekend led to me retreating into the shell a little bit, although I have finished off The Expanse series and the Space 1999 Technical manual. I did try something new though … How it started :
Those come from the in development game, Automation. It’s a car building game where you can get in to pretty detailed and well modeled parameters for the engines, gearboxes, chassis and suspension layouts. And on top, you can fiddle with the body options with a huge range of basic shells to work with which you add the features like headlights, mirrors, vents and door handles to. Anyway, that’s my first couple of cars. It made them pretty.
It has a companion simulator application called BeamNG.Drive, which lets you transfer over the cars from Automation so you can drive them around. Because what could make looking at a pretty car better than actually driving the car around and it has a number of tracks to test out your cars on, with the parameters that you designed into them. The two cars in the picture are pretty modest affairs though. The blue one is modeled on the old Triumph Spitfire Mk3, which was a 1960s era cheap sports car. The car started with an 1147cc engine and the Mk3 has a 1.3 litre engine. Small … but these cars were tiny without the modern features that add to the weight, so they were still quite sprightly. (The Spitfire competed with the Austin Sprite too).
The red one is a more modern interpretation, still a 1.3 litre but with a turbo attached for more power and other features included like fuel injection over the dual carburettors of the old Spitfire. Oh and a sensible suspension set up because I added in an interpretation of the rather dangerous rear suspension of the Spitfire.
This is probably the time for the “How it finished” …
Oh well. That’s from one of my early attempts at driving in BeamNG Drive. I’m using a controller because setting up the steering wheel takes a bit of an effort and I need to clean some of the built up Stuff on my desk in order to accommodate it. I needed to tame the controller a bit too, plus it’s about 10 years since I tried to drive with a controller and I had a concussion at the time :-D.
It was curious though, the game/app drove pretty much how I expected at lower speeds … and then bit back pretty nastily at over 100mph. I haven’t driven over 100mph in real life, (stick to 70mph yes guvnor honest) so I don’t have a valid comparison. But I think about it and without any aerodynamic devices like spoilers, splitters or diffusers, the car body will start to act like a lifting body with enough speed which means … unstable. And crashes.
I quite enjoyed that little look at driving games again and was starting to get the hang of it again after a few attempts at doing laps. I’ve been looking at Game Pass and Forza Horizon. I’d quite like to try getting into driving games again, they were fun.
I mentioned book !
The Expanse is finished, long live the Expanse. I still need to watch series 6 but I saw the books through to the end at the weekend. I’m not going to say anything about the content or storyline except that they end it well. There’s a satisfying conclusion and the last page gave a “YEY that’s a great way to finish it”. Which is about all you can ask from a series of this type. Let it tell its story … and then finish on its own terms. That’s how it should be. I was a big fan of the Honorverse series, which I gather were supposed to end at a Point … but they lost their way badly after they continued after that particular point.
It was similar with Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War series, those ended well too. I’d recommend giving those books a read. I’ll reread both the Embers of War series and The Expanse series at some point, which is perhaps the best recommendation you can give a series of books.
I’ve also finished reading the Space 1999 Technical Manual too. I have to say the writing in the technical manual was far superior to the writing in the series. If you were to use it as source material for a role playing game, it would be top notch. The Moonbase Alpha setting was very well visualised and set up, it and the characters deserved better stories.
Next up is Mutineer’s Moon, which is another series re-read. Except in this case, I only re-read the first two books and don’t bother with the third.
Have you read any great books lately ? See you around, stay safe, be well, don’t be a lunatic in the car.