Tag: internet spaceship

Cricket Bebop Shuttle

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November 23, 2021

9:42 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while again since posting – must get back in the habit of posting more regularly. I keep saying that don’t I :-). Things have been occurring since the last post. Bit of healing maybe, bit of hanging in there until we all get a chance to relax over Xmas. It does feel a bit like we’re getting a little wrung out lately. I’ve definitely been feeling that on this end and a good number of the people I interact with seem like it’s sinking in on them as well. Perhaps it’s plague related stuff … we have fatigue over being cautious mixed in with disbelief at people just forgetting that it’s still a thing.

Oh wait – forgot something … Thumbnail pic !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the aft end of our pink space ship, mostly hidden in shadow but with a row of 9 engines blazing away as the ship flies towards the opening of a circular space station.
Pixels returns …

Game wise, I feel like I’m between games at the moment. Sometimes, I’ll look at the games list and think I want to play some of them … but I don’t want to put the mental effort into learning them. Car Mechanic Simulator is cool and cathartic but I’m not sure how long I’ll continue with it. I have enjoyed my time in there though.

Game screenshot. Car Mechanic Simulator. We're in a paint shop, looking at an old style hot rod with a pointed nose and white wall tyres. The car itself is painted pink, with a Hello Kitty logo on the door.
A definite head turner

The mods are fun though. I think one thing I’d like to try is another driving simulator type game. You can drive the cars in Car Mechanic Simulator around the track but the driving model is poor* and the driving is limited to a single race track, a drag strip and a test track.

*Or the Jaguar E-Type might have been undriveable because it was fitted with upgraded everything giving it way more power at the rear wheels than it could handle :-D.

I’ve been looking at the Truck Simulator games. I actually own the base American Truck Simulator, courtesy of Humble Bundle way back. Never played it. One thing I like in games is progression, where you can build up your character as you go or build up your empire … or build a fleet of starships. Or trucks. With the entrance of Thunderdwagon 2 :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're inside a docking bay, with our ship on a rectangular landing pad illuminated by spotlights at the corners. It's a dark green ship, with sleek lines and 2 wings in the middle and 4 wings at the stern.
To the rescue !

This is the ship that completes the fleet in Elite for me … I own them all now and have used them for a genuine purpose, even if that purpose was swiftly cut short when the gameplay loop involved got boring or the ship proved inadequate for the job. In this case, the ship was built to dash in to damaged burning space stations and pull as many people out as possible. Hence the meme of the ship resembling a ship you may recognise … That gameplay loop is deeply unsatisfying though (and doesn’t pay much), so I’m back to mining again.

But apart from a Fleet Carrier, that is the end of that gameplay objective for me in Elite, unless I reset the save again and start afresh.

Other stuff – I mentioned the Cricket T20 World Cup … turned out I didn’t actually watch the final there. The wrong teams got to the final and the team that won it definitely did not deserve to. They were poor throughout, including getting murdered by England in the early stages. Perhaps there’s a bit of sour grapes there, because England got knocked out in the semi final due to a statistic I’ll get to. Mind you, England started strong and I think they were running out of steam towards the end with a few injuries taking key players out of the tournament.

Statistic ? The toss was key to the tournament … mostly because at the halfway point in the later games, the dew would come up and soak the ball making it an uneven contest. You want to have a chance at being surprised by the result … I had a sinking feeling for England’s semi because New Zealand won the toss and bowled first. Same happened for Pakistan’s game and the toss determined the order for the final too. All 3 games went with the toss. 30 games out of 45 were won by the team who won the toss. In Dubai, 12 out of 13 games were won by the team batting second with conditions in their favour.

That’s not something that makes for a tournament I’m interested in watching. The better side should win, not the side that was lucky with the coin toss at the start of the game.

Cricket’s another sport that has trouble actually, especially in England and Wales. At the moment, that’s a very well publicised case of racism at one county but the stories are coming out at the other counties as well.

I’ll make one thing clear there – I love cricket. I love to see people enjoying cricket. It doesn’t matter who they are, the colour of their skin, their ethnicity or the religion they follow. I just want to see people enjoying playing that game I love. And it turns out that too many people are turning away from playing the game due to the attitudes of those already there. That kind of attitude takes a lot to root out. It has an insidious approach as well. When I was learning the game myself, my idol was a fella called Devon Malcolm.

He was a tall, beefy fast bowler of West Indian descent. Couldn’t bat, bowled really fast (if a bit erratic). Wore glasses too for a while. I wanted to bowl like him. And he was one of a long line of players following people like Philip Defreitas, Gladstone Small, Syd Laurence, Chris Lewis, Alex Tudor and a bunch of others who’s names aren’t coming to memory right now. (I had a quiet migraine yesterday – no real headache but definite brain fog – not quite right yet)

When I saw Yorkshire playing at the start of the last season, they were all white men. And I knew back then that there was a problem. They’re based out of Leeds, with that area being a heavily BAME populated area. Even by averages, there should have been at least one BAME player in the team. And yet there were none. I think we know why now, with Yorkshire being the centre of the racism scandal hitting the English game at the moment.

I hope it sorts out. It needs to. I’m not that bothered about it making England a better side by having these guys to choose from, I just want to see more people enjoying playing the game. Oh and the more great players to see, the better the games are. I want to be guessing about the results all the way to the end, not see “Team A won the toss and bowl” and know the result from there.

I think I needed to get that particular rant out for a while. It’s not just colour though. It’s about sexuality and religion as well. I am in that privileged position of being a white straight guy. I don’t like it. It means that others are being dismissed because they’re different. Our differences make us stronger. They make us interesting. The most interesting character I saw on the series Another Life was Zayn.

The most fun character on the new Cowboy Bebop was Faye Valentine. I think the actress had a lot of fun bringing that character to life. I’d thoroughly recommend giving that show a look by the way and then watch the anime as well. It’s a quirky silly daft show set in space with a definite trend of smooth jazz style running through it.

Oh and it’s totally polarised the opinions about it as well, which amuses me.

Summary and other stuff :

Lego Space Shuttle is complete ! Need to arrange taking some decent pictures of it. It’s a chunky unit, big enough to take 5 pocket dragons in the back.

Cowboy Bebop is silly stylish fun, go watch it. Another Life is another one definitely worth watching. Paramount need a kick up the backside for taking ST Discovery off air days before it was to be released.

Internet spaceships good … disappointing implementation bad.

Racism – ugh.

Boats – yay. I’ve been watching a channel called Aquaholic. It’s run by a guy who takes a GoPro camera on to boats and does tours for us. They’re pretty special now, although we are talking multi million pound yachts here. It may be reawakening the thoughts about living on a Dutch Barge. Wonder if you could make those properly seaworthy ? One thing needed there is a radar and those go on the roof. That conflicts with barges needing to be able to fit into tunnels and under bridges.

Stream watching is good. Currently got Fuzzyfreaks on the laptop and Fallenshogun on the desktop. They’re good people to listen to. May they be able to continue entertaining us for as long as they can.

Last one – new job happened. Same organisation, different part of it. I’m learning the new basics at the moment but it’s in an area that I’m already very familiar with. It’ll see me getting out and about more too, which is great. One reason for switching is the trips in April and May reminded me of something (that I can’t put here) and this new post gets me closer to those. There are other reasons too but those aren’t going to be written here. Let’s just say healing is required …

Games can be pretty good for the healing. Whether it’s bringing the cars back to life, or flitting into an alternate universe where you can go from port to port as a space trucker.

I like being a space trucker :-).

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Have names, need ships !

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November 10, 2021

10:11 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been meaning to post more often but time feels like it’s whooshing by again :-D. I did have one idea of a Thing to write about though. (And there’s a Lego Space Shuttle that I’ll get back to after finishing this). This is going to be an Internet Spaceship post. As per usual, they’re all Elite Dangerous again, which is something I’m obliged to mention due to their picture use terms.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Out pink diamond shaped ship is in the lower half. We're looking at the back end, with a row of 9 engines flaring away. In the top half is a round space station that we're heading towards. The backdrop is the black of space with occasional starry dots.
Pixels returning to hangar

There’s stuff been going on at work which I’m not going to mention too much here but it does mean new opportunities to look at different things. Should be a good move.

In the internet spaceship domain though, I took the ship home early after quite a decent trip out there. The sightseeing tool that I have wasn’t showing any promising things to look at and there was a community goal thing that looked interesting … (The goal got completed before I got there !)

Screen capture. We're looking at a map of our galaxy from the top down. Our path is mapped out by a white trace which roughly circles the galaxy.
Have spaceship will travel

That’s the travel map as of a stop at the centre of the galaxy on 3rd November. Since then, it’s pretty much a straight line back to our part of space at the bottom. I was following a set of expedition waypoints which I would usually finish … except that apart from someone who absolutely blitzed it (their flight log on EDSM is crazy!), it looks like I’m the only one running it. I did run across the organisers’ carrier along the way but it was pretty early on in the route. So I came back early. I could go back out again … probably not though.

Elite’s on borrowed time for me. The Odyssey disaster broke a lot of the appeal for me. It’s still a very pretty game … but the flaws are raw and exposed and there’s even new bugs coming in as well now. Like a thing where it takes about 5 seconds for the stations to appear when you drop out of FTL at their location. The game needs time to load in the textures so it can show us the station. Performance has improved though, although my system is not a fair test there because it’s gone from a fairly recent but struggling 1060 3GB card to a brand new 3060 Ti card with 8GB of memory. That’s going from a card with 1000ish parallel processing things to one with just under 5000 and far better memory infrastructure on it. (Without being geeky – it’s possibly 5-6 times as powerful and has other advantages).

Wait ! I had an idea for this post. I have a bunch of names for ships … and I don’t think I’ll be expanding the fleet any more past :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in an enclosed ship hangar with dim overhead lighting and adverts and struts to the sides. Our ship stands proud on the pad. It's a big green smooth sided ship that we're looking at from the front. It dwarfs our pilot, standing below the nose.
Waiting to rescue

That’s Thunderdwagon 2, callsign IR1965. People may recognise where that comes from :-D. The purpose of this ship was to run rescue missions to evacuate people from damaged space stations. But I didn’t last long with that because that particular gameplay loop is boring and doesn’t pay at all well. I may well reconfigure this one for spaceship rescues and press CAT404 back into service as a miner. That’s another tribute name :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A blue and white angular and blocky spaceship is pointing down and towards the right of shot. We're in a field of space rocks.
Prepare the mining lasers !

That’s the Towel of Space, aka CAT404. This is another tribute name for Katherine Of Sky, who is one of those lovely voices I enjoy listening to. Here’s a link to her youtube channel and the first of a few links for today. The problem with this ship is that because it’s bigger, mining sessions were taking too long and pushing my arms to the point of pain but different mining might mean shorter sessions.

I have all the ships now … and still have a bunch of names I want to use ! Which is conflicting with a wanting to say nice things about people. So I thought, do I need the ships to say the nice things ? Nope. Here goes. On the ship list is :

Searching For Pixels, callsign FUZZ3H. I do actually have the ship, this is the pink with white checkerboard one that I’ve been dashing round the galaxy in. The name was for the mission of the ship, to see how the Odyssey expansion affected exploration. (Lighting is terrible) The callsign is for Fuzzyfreaks, who is a delight to watch. Her eyes just got drawn to the game Kenshi again, so she’s been playing that.

The next one is the Bringer of Nuggets, callsign V4N-D1 and there is definitely some meme-age going on there. OMGVandi is one of those fiery passionate people who catches you up totally in what she’s doing. I first caught sight of this lovely Canadian lady from the Moonkissed and Sunkissed role play shows but she also has way too much fun playing Among Us with friends as well as Grand Theft Auto V role play. A definite force and one hell of a personality. She enjoys what she does so much and is very happy to bring viewers along for a wild and exciting ride. OH ! Check out her artwork too, there’s a collection here (Linky)

If I was to build a new ship for Drew Wagar’s farewell tour, it would be Acolyte of Wagar, callsign F3D0R4. Drew Wager (Twitch link) is one of the authors who wrote in the Elite universe as well as universes of his own creating. He does several streams with games like No Mans Sky or retro games, plus a writing stream. He’s a chilled out English gent who is another pleasure to listen to, although he’s usually on when there’s other people I’ll watch instead who are also streaming. And there’s only so many people you can watch at once. His youtube channel has the videos for his previous Lore tour, which I enjoyed catching up with. There’s another event coming up but I’ll bring out the old Cobra, Tea-89 for that as a nod back to the original Elite game.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a spaceship within a hangar. This is a small ship with cockpit window in the centre. The outer wing sections are orange, the centre is white.
At rest, for now

Next up is the Searching For Dynamite, callsign SH4RK5. This is for the wonderful KatiePetersPlays, (Twitch link) who streams all sorts of games, appears on role playing shows and has a couple of podcasts too. She’s a lovely person, is the centre of an incredibly welcoming wholesome community and the anarchy around what she does is massive fun to be around. Her discord server is the Space Sharks, most of her twitch emotes are sharks, which will tell you where that comes from. And then there’s also a fun alert that she has where in totally serious mode says “And the dynamite goes boom”. It’s one of those things that makes me laugh and watching her stuff is great for the soul. On a bit late for UK viewers though :-D.

I had a little series of potential names for a ship named for Enter Elysium but didn’t settle on one I was happy with. The theme was generally around robbing banks, after this became a bit of a meme in his channel following the disappointing follow on to the original Evil Genius game. EE doesn’t make much content now but when he does, I try and tune in when he does, plus the old videos are still there on his youtube channel. He’s a fun one to watch and the old content is still good.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in the in game paint job store, looking at a ship labelled "Cobra Mk III Festive Red". The ship is roughly half a hexagon, chopped in half and we're looking down on it from above. The ship is painted red, with some white snowflakes.
It’s almost that time folks …

This one would be Dances with Snowmen, callsign -K1R1-. I haven’t been watching 2dKiri for long and she starts a bit early for me too, with streams starting up at lunchtime. But I’ll tune in after closing up the work laptop. She’s another lovely chilled out person who is a pleasure to watch. You know, calming and enjoyable around that too with great chat interaction (she doesn’t miss much at all) and is very happy to join in with chat’s odd sense of humour. Youtube link this time because the highlight shows are on there plus links to Twitch. There’s also a snow meme that runs throughout her content and I especially love the dancing snowman emote, so 2dKiri’s ship would have to have something snow related. (And I got this one free!)

However, if I used this for Drew Wagar’s farewell tour, then it would be somewhat along the way to advertising another streamer in his stream, which is really bad etiquette. So it’ll be the Tea-89 Cobra instead.

Last one for today is the wonderful person I’m listening to at the moment … Tashnarr (Twitchy link). I missed out on so much of Tash’s content, mostly because Twitch is a thing where you can only really watch one person at a time. If I’m watching Tash, that means I’m not watching Shenryyr (great guy, another really chilled out fun one) or a different one. So it took a while before I started watching Tash as much as I do now. And she is definitely that person that I’ll switch over to as soon as she comes online, disappearing quietly from the person I was watching before. Definite character, cheeky, chirpy, sassy, lovely person on screen, very emotive, smart, great voice and I’m running out of adequate words … I think she has a lot of fun with what we come up with in chat too.

This is Tash’s latest tribute ship :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A blue gas giant can be seen in the background. A ring system of rocks is in the upper right half, starting diagonally across the picture. Our ship is a crimson and orange diamond shaped ship, with 2 clusters of 6 engines at the back.
Ready to mine

That’s the Manic Minarr and I’ll go back into that one at some point soon. Back to Tash’s stream now though ! Although I’m now wondering about what a tribute name for Becca Godsey, aka Caustic Phoenix would be. She’s another fun passionate lady to watch (on late again 😀 ) and is a fantastic host for the Pink Pixels weekly podcast on TheGameHers channel.

Stay safe, be well everyone.

Where was I again ?

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November 3, 2021

9:09 pm

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Been meaning to post for a bit 🙂 Subjects have been escaping my head though :-D.

I do enjoy talking about the computer games but it does feel sometimes like it’s a one track thing for here and I do like the variation. I haven’t done a music post for a good long while, so that’s due as well. I’ll go on to the cricket world cup, which I’ve been enjoying having on in the background or time delayed for after I close the work laptop down.

Cartoon picture. A T-Rex dinosaur is stretching their little arms towards a big red button on the wall. A sign above says "Push button if you're sick of cartoonists making fun of short T-Rex arms."
Needed thumbnail tribute, randomness selected

Credit to the Roguesymmetry link and signature in the picture. I have been pretty tired lately, although the body is somewhat cooperating. I do have issues sometimes reaching for things with my right arm though. That’s the arm with the weak shoulder, so stretching out the arm can push it beyond a certain limit and then I go ouch. I am really struggling for energy at the moment though.

Internet spaceship has been busy … and surprisingly ok on the arm. Although there are limits there as well. I’ve had a couple of days off the crazy travel mode flying but :

Screen capture picture. We see a map of our solar system, seen from above. Where we live is down in the lower part. A thick white trace shows my travel path over the last 12 months.
Zoom zoom space ship

That’s my Elite travel map over the last 12 months. There’s a lot of light years been travelled, although that includes the more epic round the galaxy to its extreme extents trip that finished around May this year. This one has been a bit more modest, starting out around our area of space down the bottom and sightseeing my way up and left (North Northwest) and around to the top end of the galaxy. Since then, it’s following a set of waypoints back into the Galactic Core and the way back will follow the faint green line on that map which starts off going to the right a bit.

I should get back well in time for a planned rendezvous and meet up with other Elite people on the 18th. And then I’m honestly not sure what will happen with Elite. The Odyssey expansion was such a disappointment. It is still a very pretty game though and I did like wandering around space. Some of the new minigames and mechanics though like the exobiology exploration are just really, really bad though. I’ve seen only minor variations on the new foliage on the atmospheric planets and the stuff you need to do to collect the required information to log them is … No. I’m not sure who in the dev team thought that was a good idea.

Oh as an aside, the thing behind the map there is from the podcast type stream I’m watching/listening to at the moment. It’s Sheepy’s aka TheWanderingInn (Twitch link) regular weekly Bar Brawl where he gets a guest in and talks about Stuff. Often it’s about the role playing shows that he runs and the guest’s part in that. And then they’ll go into the mayhem of an arbitrary Tier List. Chaos usually ensues with the tier list. Today’s guest is the ever wonderful Tashnarr (Twitch link again). They’re a good couple of streamer community people and I really enjoy the Tash streams.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink diamond shaped ship is in the lower centre of screen. The left hand side is dominated by a round space station with a rectangular entrance in the centre. It is lit by a series of red lights. A planet is to the top right. The sky behind is clustered with a busy field of stars.
A home away from home

That’s Explorer’s Anchorage, a quick hop away from Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy. I’m docked up there until resuming the journey back in, which will be at the weekend. (Combination of resting the arms and maxing out the funny internet currency earning that goes towards in game cosmetics).

Oh I’ve also been highly enjoying tearing cars apart and rebuilding them in Car Mechanic Simulator. It’s a satisfying thing. Perhaps I might be coming to the end of the big interest in that but it has been oddly cathartic. Dyson Sphere Programme appeared in the last steam sale as well.

Game screenshot. Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. We're inside a white walled paint shop area. In the centre, a green Jaguar E Type convertible with super sleek classic lines.
Now with Jaguars

Cricket ? World Cup’s been pretty good so far, although there has been a definite pattern appear where the team batting second has been winning a disproportionate number of games. One reason for this is that with the games being played on the transition to night time, heavy dew comes down which affects the ability of the bowlers to grip the ball. This gives an advantage to the team batting first. I don’t think it’s actually changed the results much though, a lot of them have gone with the expected form.

England have been doing remarkably winning 2 very one sided games and then met Sri Lanka raised their game a lot from previous form and were unlucky to come second in that game. It’s mostly been down to just how good England have been all the way through the side. All of the players have been stepping up with great performances and while a few of the sides have been not great in the field, England have been nigh on perfect.

There’s a cricket saying which is “Catches win matches” and it’s massively true. Cricket sides tend to build a momentum, which can get unstoppable. A wicket usually slams a brake on that momentum, so missing that chance for a wicket by dropping an easy catch has a big impact on the game. Like in the Sri Lanka game, where it looked like Sri Lanka would get over the line for the win until England started taking wickets, with the wickets making the momentum of the game swing the other way.

Another one is the attitude that the teams show on the field as well. I used to really enjoy fielding closer in within the ring. It kept me involved in the game. I’d be noisy and constantly encouraging the other players in the team. Clapping a lot, bringing that noise, trying to terrify the batsmen into hesitating with over enthusiastic fielding. That’s really important too as if a side goes quiet, they drift and it allows the batting to build that momentum. I’d get bored when dispatched to the outer areas of the field. I was away from the people I’d be interacting with and generally less involved in the game. It was tough to maintain the focus out there. The huge thing though was what happens when something doesn’t go to plan, like a catch dropped or a bowler losing their focus. You can respond to that either by attacking your own team, or by upping the encouragement again with a “Next time!” or similar. Some of the teams in the World Cup have been going down the attacking the team route. You have to get your own game spot on there if you do that or it just brings down the team.

One of my later seasons saw a bowler come in after a long time off, including surgery. The tiredness was settling in and getting to him. So I walk back with him to his bowling mark, give him a bit of gentle encouragement, slow his walk down a little and give him a “Take your time, you got this”. Kinda like letting him borrow a bit of confidence back again by showing him that his fielding team mate had confidence in him. Took a wicket that over. Good times. That’s one I still remember :-D.

Anyway – England are doing great in the World Cup. It’s been great to see some of the newer sides come in as well. Like Afghanistan, who must terrify the major teams. They have a great side. Oman were wonderful hosts, it was sad that they didn’t win through.

What else to talk about ? Job change next week, looking forward to it.

Back to the Bar Brawl now though. Stay safe, be well, stay warm everyone.

Time off, Time out

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October 15, 2021

8:59 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been in the downtime phase again. I usually look to grab a week off around October, it’s good to have that little bit of downtime before heading into the Xmas things. One thing I’ve noticed this time around, I think the nighttimes drawing in has affected me more this year, although you wouldn’t know that from some of the bed times that have happened this week :-D.

What’s been happening ? I saw a friend on Friday evening, we met up for board games. It was a fun evening and good to be out and about like that again. That’s a curious thing here in the UK at the moment though. The plague stuff hasn’t gone away. People are just ignoring it. At least that’s the feeling in England anyway. Scotland was a bit more aware and militant about it in the eateries I was in while I was up there. Wales is somewhere in the middle.

Picture. A small castle on a mound is in the centre of shot. A curtain wall can be seen to the right in the distance and the foreground is a mix of stone, paved and grass. Occasional people dot the scene.
Castle !

Yep. Been the Cardiff again. It’s a good city centre but it can be a bit of a pain to get in and out of, mostly due to the roads just before the trunk road start. But … it has :

Antics model shop.

Wally’s Delicatessen.

Troutmark Books

Lego Shop.

Yep. Lots of good things there. I would like to find some music shops to browse in for when I’m there. There’s a decent sized HMV but it’s in a separate area of the city to the St David’s (Dewi Saint) area where I park up and there’s a question between the time taken to walk over there and getting away early enough to beat the worst of the traffic.

I didn’t acquire anything from the Lego shop this time (Ice Penguin was tempting) but there was loot from the other places.

Picture. 4 bags of sweets, the book Lost World by Michael Cricton and a flat pack wooden kit dragon are lying on a black sheet.
Loot ! And dust !

Yep. Is dusty. I’ll be enjoying the bonbons, fudge and sherbets later. And that is an actual kit wooden dragon. I haven’t started it yet, got a space shuttle to finish first.

It was a good little loot haul yesterday, although I have to admit I was looking for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. My copy has gone somewhere and I’d like to read that one again. I’ve commented before about how that author tends to not really know how to finish off a story and that’s the case here with the Mars trilogy. They start great, with KSR’s always wonderful world building continuing through the next books … but the story fizzles out along the way. Red Mars is a good one though and I liked Nadia’s story.

The book I’m in at the moment is The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell. Great local author, check him out. His Embers of War trilogy is fantastic and Silversands was pretty good as well. I suspect I’ll end up collecting his various books. The Recollection is set across a whole heap of time zones and it has a good little twist on what we usually take as read from travel across the stars. Without diving too deep into spoiler space, the hyperspace engines that jump the ships across the stars can’t beat light speed. The people inside will zap across in a subjective instant for them but in reality, it’s taken 7 years to jump 7 light years.

And as per usual, he’s dropped some rather interesting characters and situations into that mix as well. Looking forwards to diving through it.

The last book was Network Effect by Martha Wells, 5th in the Murderbot series and another series I’d recommend heavily. I need to read Jurassic Park actually. It was bought at Troutmark Books again, same as the sequel. I just haven’t got round to giving it a read yet.

There has been a lot of gaming happening this week as well.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on a dusty moon. Our pilot in her white flightsuit is to the left, pointing a device at some purple and cream stalks growing out of the ground. The purple buggy is off to the right and we can see half of the ship further right. A dim planet can be seen to the left.
Odd looking trees

Apparently I haven’t been in Elite since the 5th. It’s struggling for me as a game. The Odyssey expansion was a disaster in terms of performance in the game combined with a lot of promises that just fell incredibly flat. People are now wondering if Elite has a future as a game past the next couple of years. It’s a multiplayer online game that currently has the player base fractured between Odyssey gaming and Horizon gaming (new expansion, previous expansion). The multiplayer was borderline whether it worked before the latest expansion, with trouble getting into the same instance as other players. The big issue there is that the servers are over at Frontier’s place and when the game becomes uneconomic to run, they’ll turn off the servers. So Elite probably has a limited life span at this point.

Oh and there’s a small matter of it causing me arm issues when I play it for too long as well.

Outside of the internet spaceships, there’s been Humankind. That’s a pretty new civilisation type game, although one difference it has it that you’re supposed to change the civilisation you play as you progress through the eras. So, start as the Egyptians, progress through being the Celts and end up as the Italians. Each civilisation has their own special units and buildings. It’s an interesting take on the game system and I’ve been enjoying learning what it’s got.

An older one that I still enjoy is Motorsport Manager.

Game screenshot. Motorsport Manager. It's the end of a race. We see the finishing straight with one of our cars. Status displays are bottom left and bottom right. Other displays are at the top. The race positions are to the left.
That’s not supposed to be a thing …

I’ve been continuing my run going through the different types of racing with this being endurance racing. The intention was to keep the team in the lower category, farming the sponsor money until we could afford the Headquarters upgrades that allow better parts to be made. The two categories race together and the lower category is supposed to be outclassed by the higher category. Yet … first race of a season and we’re in front and winning the race … This isn’t really supposed to happen :-D. I think it’s probably down to the higher category having a performance reset which has slowed them down but I also know how to optimise my people getting the best upgrades and there’s an Energy Recovery System speed boost thing that’s very open to abuse where the AI doesn’t realise it should be speed boosting and not fuel saving.

Motorsport Manager is still a great game though, there’s been nothing of its type on PC for far too long.

I may have disappeared down a bit of a XCom Enemy Within Long War rabbit hole as well today. Enemy Within is an expanded version of the first XCom remake, where the aliens are invading and your job is to repel them with your soldiers. Long War is a fan made expansion / conversion which takes a lot of the systems and alters them for a longer and I think more balanced game. I was enjoying playing the early days of it today.

Oh and I reset my Mars Horizon spacepedia as well so I’ll be going through unlocking everything there again.

So … enjoying having the downtime from work. Getting my sleep at the wrong times (need to go back to a more normal sleep pattern again!)

Cardiff was a good wander yesterday, enjoyed the board games. Oh and I got a little bit of research in yesterday. After finishing Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I went back to another fairly recent game :

Game screenshot. Mass Effect Andromeda. We're on an arid, desert planet looking down from a hill at an outpost base. Hill walls are in the distance behind the base. There is a huge wheel like object. Our spaceship is off to the right.
Outpost !

That’s Mass Effect Andromeda with the graphics options turned up to the maximum. The biggest thing to notice is how much better the shadows are. Texture quality feels better as well. Textures start as a flat image that are mapped on to the objects in the 3d world. That causes loss of quality, so techniques like anisotropic filtering help to get that detail back. The better graphics card lets me turn up those settings, due to more memory and more processing capability and it makes those textures look much better, crisper and more distinct. It also allows huge improvements for reflections and shadows. The earlier version of this screenshot from Jan 2020 has a very indistinct shadow for the spaceship to the right, instead of the crisp one in this screenshot.

I’ve been enjoying the Andromeda story again. Time to hit post though and go back to watching Tashnarr play another game legendary for its graphics … she’s in a Crysis …

Stay safe, be well everyone.

Bonding around

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October 5, 2021

9:51 pm

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I’ve been out and about again …

I’m still pretty nervous about being around People at the moment. The pandemic hasn’t gone away, it’s just been masked (so to speak) by the lessened effect on those who have been able to get vaccinated. The cases per day are still pretty high here (around 30,000 a day) but less people are needing to be hospitalised.

Still, it hasn’t gone away. And a lot of that is down to people largely abandoning anti plague precautions. I don’t wear a mask around people for me. I wear it for the people who I’m around. I firmly believe I had Covid around April 2020 and probably passed it around to a few people while I was doing shopping before the mask mandate came out.

Oh I’m also wearing the mask and vaccinated for the people who can’t do either of those. I wouldn’t want to harm anyone as a result of my actions or inactions there. I abandoned plans for having take out after my outing on Friday. Reason 1 was the first place being packed out, people queuing to park. Nah. Worse than the petrol stations ! Reason 2 was the only person wearing a mask around the kebab shop was me. So no kebab. Reason 3 is me being perfectly capable of sticking something in the oven for half an hour and it being edible when it comes out.

So … Friday adventure and that title ?

Picture. An assortment of sweet edible objects are in bags on a black chair. My red fluffy dwagon and one of my pocket dragons are in attendance as well.
Nom

I had a little collection of objectives for the outing … First was recycling the plastic bottles, which is conveniently by a petrol station that usually isn’t too busy, especially at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. So I managed to fill the car up as well, then promptly doing 80 miles there and back to get sweeties. I’m not using the car really enough at the moment because of the whole avoiding people thing, so it’s good to give it a bit of a run occasionally. I’ve still got at least 440 miles in the tank, so no need to go near the places where muppets are panic buying petrol.

I skipped it from the alt text because I was intending to put it here but the loot haul was : 2 packets of soft strawberry bonbons. 1 packet of lemon sherbets. 1 plain chocolate brownie. 1 packet of 4 small chocolate brownies. A packet of 8 blocks of shortbread. A packet of chocolate mice. And a packet of all butter fudge as well. Gloucester farm shop services does good loot … but don’t eat anything out of their quick kitchen. It’s bit me in the behind most of the times I have.

And after collecting loot, I was back in the city at an appropriate time for …

Picture. 6 elevated rows of cushioned seats can be seen. The scene is dimly lit, save for a bright light at the centre back. The seats are all empty.
Cue the movie !

There’s a reason why I’ll happily go to this cinema rather than the ones which are slightly more accessible or have better eating facilities around them. It’s empty ! No one goes there ! I like this. I watched the latest James Bond film and it was just me and 2 other people in the theatre.

Good times. Although as you’ll see from the picture, the seats don’t have headrests, which is an improvement I’d like them to make.

Good film by the way. If you’re interested in the Bond daft action movie genre, go for it. It works well as a Bond movie and a daft popcorn movie. And that’s all I’ll say about it except that I think we’ll miss Daniel Craig as Bond, he did a great job of it. Wonder who will be 007 in the next Bond movie ?

I’ve been back in the books as well, with Murderbot 5 being the last book, Streams of Silver before then and Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi before then. I’m up and down with the books. I do enough heavy reading at work that I shy away from continuing it after hours. But Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has been excellent and compelling. They’re short novellas (Network Effect is full length) but I think that somewhat works for them. The books kick off at a fast pace, don’t waste any time and rattle through their story while putting you in the space that Murderbot lives in.

I got far more enjoyment out of each Murderbot book than I did out of Rama II or Existence (didn’t finish either, abandoned them as tedium). Oh and I’ll be rereading them at some point too, which is always a good sign that a book was worth acquiring if it’s one you like going back to. Like The Martian, I read that again recently and enjoyed it just as much this time as the other times I’ve read it.

Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore is another re-read. Not so good this time but I remember it being a weaker book the first time I read it. Ghost Brigades was a good sequel, that opened up and developed that particular series.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. A night time scene. Buildings dominate the left and right side as we're looking down a street towards a bridge. The white paint of a crossing is in front of us and we can see triangular lighting in the upper distance.
Prague by night

I finished off my Deus Ex Mankind Divided run as well. It was the permadeath achievement run this time and I managed it with only two occasions where I needed to restore the save file. Oh and there was a bit of reloading as well where fights may have started by accident. This is the same location as a screenshot in the last post by the way. The main part of the game is based in a fictional version of Prague. You visit Prague 3 times and the time and situation shifts a little each time. I won’t go into that much for spoiler reasons but it’s as pretty at night as it is in the daytime. The advanced graphics options allow for far prettier effects and the reflections and lighting are a highlight.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking towards a square apartment building. Above the ground, the building is shrouded by green panels that obscure the image. The building is reflected in a watery road surface which shows the windows of the building.
Reflecting on things

It’s pretty but not perfect … I don’t think we should be seeing the windows of the building reflected on the road there with them being shrouded by the green display screens. I did enjoy playing through the game again and appreciating the improved graphics capabilities.

I would thoroughly recommend the 2 Adam Jensen Deus Ex games, if you like story based first person shooter type games.

Oh and I’ve been piloting the internet spaceship as well, being in a bit of travel mode lately.

I’m having to be somewhat careful with my gaming activities at the moment. It’s turned a little colder here, which has been attacking my weakened shoulder. A consequence of that has been a sore elbow (that’s new) and dodginess in the wrist as well. So I have to listen to the signs, find a place to land and put the flightstick away when the pain starts surfacing.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is landed on a white icy moon. Traces of an atmosphere are shading the horizon in the distance. Our buggy is in the lower left, pointing towards the camera with headlights on. A very faint arc of the planet this moon orbits can be almost seen above the nose of the ship, to right of shot.
Trees in the distance

This was tonight’s landing spot and I was lucky enough to find a suitable place fairly quickly. The criteria is a moon around a planet with rings, preferably with some surface features to look at as well. This time, a suitable moon appeared on the plot quickly, with an atmosphere as well. When I landed, I could see the tree like objects that can be just about seen below the ship’s engines (left of shot).

Another bug in the game at the moment is that the system that’s supposed to tell you where planetary surfaces are … isn’t working. So it’s pot luck as to whether you find anything in your chosen spot. This time, as per usual it was a case of looking for a landing spot in the sun with the parent plan above the horizon. Sadly the parent planet is a bit dark and hidden in the atmosphere trace here.

Oh ! Job stuff is happening too. No change in the organisation I work for, just a move to a different part of it. Soon.

Looking forward to it.

I think that’s enough for me for a bit – stay safe, be well. Have fun.

Upgrades and adventures …

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September 25, 2021

10:51 am

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Hello everyone,

I thought I’d been back to posting more ! Oh well. Been a bit distracted by seeing what the new graphics card can do and going back to Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Prague has got prettier …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking down a city street with high sided buildings on either side. The buildings have railed balconies looking out over adverts on the lower walls. A Police van is on the left with a few other vehicles parked. In the distance is a pedestrian bridge with a person looking out from the centre. They are framed in the centre of a sharply triangular roof of the distant train station.
Prague by day

I’ve never been to Prague so I don’t know how real the map of the city we have in game is or how it compares to the real thing but … the architecture they show off in the game is super pretty. The police get a bit of a drubbing in comparison but they’re a hostage to the increasing rhetoric the game has about prejudice against augmented people.

I’ve taken the opportunity with the new graphics card to turn the pretty options up to maximum (with two exceptions …) So with the not long ago rained level of water on the tarmac, there are all sorts of amazing reflection and even better lighting.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're inside a building. 3 people are dancing in the background, with a DJ dancing away behind a mixer desk festooned with switches and sliders. A 5th person is leaning on the mixer desk. The walls in the background are covered in graffiti and we see the blue lines of light projected on the wall behind and the mixer desk.
5 Ravers raving ?

This is one of the side quests where you’re investigating a drug that kills augmented people. Side quests in these games usually involve getting loot and experience which makes your character more powerful in the long run. I’m playing a permadeath run where if my character dies, it tags the save game file so that it can’t be opened again. I’ll get all but 1 remaining achievement for the main game in this run, the bank robbery mission lets you save your boss later but you can’t do that and the mission for the achievement I’m missing.

It’s always good being back in these games. Instead of being all guns blazing, you can tackle the game in super stealth mode, slipping through unnoticed and leaving no trace. (Which gets you bonus experience as well). It’s possible to go all the way through the game without firing a shot, although it’s much easier to just knock people out so they don’t raise the alarm while you’re grabbing their stuff.

There are issues though … I had a false start where the game was crashing quickly when I had all of the graphics turned up to maximum. Here goes – search engine optimisation bit :

If Deus Ex Mankind Divided is crashing your graphics card driver, turn off the MSAA and VSync. The MSAA is an Anti-aliasing technique that smooths out any jagged lines and VSync stops the image tearing as you move around. Since turning those off, I’ve only had one crash to desktop during this playthrough, which I’ll put down to the game being slightly less robust than the first Adam Jensen game.

In terms of what’ll come next after Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I have a couple of options.

It’s highly likely to be Mass Effect Andromeda, as I like Sara Ryder as a character and it’ll let me push those graphics options up to maximum as well. This one can be a really pretty game although there is literally too much you need to do in a single playthrough.

The Outer Worlds is another one that has more to give than I’ve seen before … I bounced off this game though without finishing it. Got bored, didn’t like the characters except for Parvati.

Control is a more recent one that has a lot of new graphics techniques that have come to the new cards. But … I look at it and then back to Deus Ex MD and the older game is just a far pretty game compared to Control’s drab environments and repeated enemies. Yep, Control has some incredibly daft full motion video flavour stuff around its story but … while I own it courtesy of Humblebundle (didn’t buy it, just did the old sub), I have no interest in playing it.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on the front of our ship from slightly above, as she has her stern to a black hole. We see the black hole as a globe of clustered stars, with a clear opening in the centre, like an eye. A cloud is lensed around that spherical not-object in the centre.
Engines to maximum

This was me checking out the Tartarus black hole and having the happy sight that black holes, were indeed not broken in the latest expansion to the game. I’d visited another one and didn’t have all the lovely lensing that you see in the picture there, where the extreme gravity bends the light in wonderful and weird ways. You don’t get the full splendour of it from the static shot, when you’re moving around the black holes you get the stars in the background dancing around.

I’m still on and off in Elite. It’s a sad case where the game is perfectly playable now, although frame rates are really bad when you get close to the surface. The performance is far better since my new card arrived but it’s the 5th best nVidia card you can buy right now. It should be good. However I know that the performance will drop off again when I get back to the populated areas … as that’s what people have been reporting.

It’s gone to a “we’re not angry, we’re just incredibly disappointed”. The latest attempt at a fix came out on Thursday and it apparently brought a bunch of fixes with the logic that runs missions and other things in the game but … it’s done nothing to fix the graphical bugs. Those are the ones that cause the really bad frame rates that make it dangerous to fly low level, the ones that cause massive pop in of terrain* and the one that really frustrates me, the massive change in lighting as you near the surface of planets which turns Pretty And Interesting Screenshot into either bleached out white or everything’s lost in the dark.

*Terrain popup is where you’re flying towards a mountain range or a cliff and what you see of the ground keeps rising in front of you. It’s where you thought you were heading just above the crest of a cliff but instead, more ground pops up and you’re heading for the cliff.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a dark moon, we're just lit up by a dim sun off to right of shot. Our pilot is centre bottom looking at the camera in a white flightsuit. The purple bodied buggy is just behind and our pink spaceship is landed in the distance behind them. Over to the left, a dark grey planetoid is on the horizon. Behind all that at centre top is one of the neon green gas giants, we can just see the planet's rings.
Camping at Abeonas Blessing

It’s still a pretty game though and the Kamd site is giving me some tasty waypoints to check out, although not all of those are actually translating to the features still being available to look at in the game. I’m also using my own rules to find nice places to stop at. I’ll be looking for ringed gas giants with moons orbiting them that you can land on. Planets you can land on with thin atmospheres are a particular favourite for stopping at. But it’s mostly a question of whether I can set up a pretty screenshot with something interesting to look at.

Oh and they’re going on to Instagram as well now. The world needs more pretty pictures to look at.

I am suffering a little though … My dodgy right arm has been complaining again both from the shoulder end and the wrist is giving me the messages as well on a “be careful” level rather than the actual real pain level. It’s one of those cases where the pain signals I get from it are ignorable without painkiller support but it’s a warning that if I keep going with the piloting and the spy games, I’ll have trouble.

You know what that means …. less game more book !

I think that’s enough for today.

PC upgrades are working nicely – temperatures are well under control, the graphics are pretty and I’ve been enjoying visiting an old friend again.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're standing in front of a shop area. The lighting is subdued but there are a few brighter point light sources dotted around, plus a sigh above the entrance that spells out "Entity" with an arrow in those dot lights again. A masked bodyguard stands outside the entrance.
Shop !

Yep. Visited Entity again. She isn’t in the game very much, with her appearance being limited to a shop in a location you only travel through once. I adore the character though. She doesn’t have much to say but she’s fun and very realistic in what her situation is. She’s in the ghetto because she couldn’t do her old job any more and she knows that it could either be running the shop or being in a brothel. It gives her a flirty attitude which also reflects the “need money by any means in order to live” situation.

I like the character, she’s a fun addition.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Thinking PC market again …

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September 16, 2021

9:50 pm

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Every so often, the thought hits me that I need to be checking out the PC market again to see what’s available and how much it would be. I don’t think I’ve done that for a little while, so here goes !

Picture. A brown and white cat is sitting on a computer. The caption is "I had to rebutt your computer."
Indeed

I’ve just done some overdue upgrades to Meltdown, my desktop, and they’ve turned out pretty good. Tuesday saw a rather traumatic upgrading of the cpu cooler from the cheap stock one to a top end air cooler. More on that in a bit although I did write something on the results the other day. I also upgraded the data hard drive from 1.5TB to 3TB and did the copy overnight, so I now have 1.2TB available on that drive up from 150GB.

Yesterday saw a new graphics card arrive, a 3060Ti. Graphics cards are still very pricey but I spotted a good enough deal when I was finishing up my lunch break on Tuesday. So that went in yesterday and there was a little shakedown run in Elite happening.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the rear right of our pink spaceship as we're parked on the edge of an impact crater on a dusty orange moon. The little buggy is behind and to the right.
Before the upgrade

That’s before changes happened …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on our pink spaceship at the rear right quarter again. The picture is very similar to the last, except a little around to anti-clockwise. There is no buggy this time.
Any difference ?

One thing you always end up doing when doing upgrades is think : Was it worth it ? Did it improve pictures ? I’m not so sure in Elite to be honest. I’ve turned the detail up much higher so the shadows and textures should be much sharper and it’s creating the image at 1.5x what my display can do which has been making the lines look better. The landing I did yesterday was much smoother than it has been before but the real test there will be when I get back to a planetary base … that’s not going to happen for months on my current course :-D.

So. PC building ? The first thing I always say is that if you’re confident enough to pick your own bits and put them together, always do that. Pre-built PCs always tend to come with compromises that bite later. Like shaving £20-£30 off the price by putting in a substandard power supply. If you’re running a system like Meltdown is now, anything less than a 600W power supply (mine is 750W) will start getting strained. If it’s not a brand named supply with protections built in, it WILL damage components when it WILL stop working. My previous desktop, Pumpkin, had a power supply fail (it was in service for 8 years, so that’s ok) but it happily didn’t break anything.

It’s worth sacrificing something like the cpu down a step or two in order to get the foundations right. Yes. I said that :-D. And I meant it too. Graphics is a bit more of a thing there though. Previously, when cards were £200, I’d get that certain price point. Lower would mean losing too much performance, higher was too expensive. That’s out of the window these days and you’re lucky to find graphics cards, let alone having them at an acceptable price.

The second thing I’ll be saying about PC building at the moment is – Don’t. The supply situation has been daft for almost a year now. It’s gone to the point where you have to ignore that advice about pre-builds because the vendor builders have better access to the parts.

So … foundations. I learned something with Meltdown … don’t buy a Bitfenix case (build quality). Case first as that’s what everything goes into. Bigger is better because that means more access and you’ll probably hide it somewhere out of the way. Budget £50 for a case but … you go for your preference because it’s something where looks count, just make sure it’s got room for what you want. Drive bays are irrelevant now as it’s ok to go to dvd or bluray drives that you plug in. You’ll want front panel access for USB sockets though so you can plug in the drives.

Processor and board drive a lot of the build. I’ve been impressed with my AMD Ryzen 5 3600. It’s a good processor. I was about to say that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G was a good buy here but it’s out of stock (oh well 😀 ). It’s a bit expensive at £240 but it does come with graphics hardware inside which is important in these days of scarce graphics cards.

This goes in a motherboard and the cheapest suitable X570 (the processor expects certain chipsets of which X570 is one) board is an Asrock at £160. This is an example of being sure what you’re getting, there are a couple of cheaper MSI boards but they don’t have a graphics output. Oops.

Memory goes in pairs and the thing to look for is the telltale “DDR4-3600 support”. The DDR stands for Double Data Rate and the code says how fast it can push the data out. Faster is better … There’s a certain break point though. When I built Meltdown, the advice was that 3200 was good enough, lower was bad. I went for a future proofed 32GB on Meltdown. 32GB of DDR4-3200 is £140 from Crucial (cheaper available but I recognise and trust Crucial) or £180 for 32GB of DDR-3600 from Kingston, as per what’s in Meltdown. One trick here is that you need to buy the memory in pairs as the systems are designed to take in data from both sticks of memory at the same time.

We need a cooler to go on top and I always go for Big Coolers. The idea is that they give better performance and because they’re massive, the fans are barely turning so they’re very quiet. I can barely hear Meltdown’s coolers at the moment. Crikey, looks like they’ve gone up … I have a Coolermaster MA610P and the nearest looking equivalent I can see on Da Vendor Site is the MA620M at £90. I didn’t pay that much 2 years ago. Budget £50 for a cooler and always remember that bigger is way better because a bigger fan pushes way more cooling air with less noise.

Water cooling ? Don’t do it. It has advantages but it also has huge potential of mixing Water and Electronics, which never ends well. You also need fans to get rid of the heat anyway, I just don’t see the benefit of it in the domestic environment.

We need a power supply to drive all that and I’ve been happy with the Corsair supplies I’ve been using for many years. You don’t need modular (you plug in the power cords separately) so you can save cash there. A 750W supply from Corsair starts at £65. Shaving £20 off that for the no-name brands is a false economy.

Graphics is the really frustrating thing at the moment … Between covid hitting manufacturing and cryptominers and scalpers gobbling up the supply, it’s been really tough to acquire a new graphics card. My 3060Ti was an opportunity buy at £470 and the cheapest one at Overclockers is currently £650 or £670 for the one in stock where I bought mine, which was Scan. Which card ? Much of a muchness at the moment but I wouldn’t go beyond the 3060 or 3060Ti cards, or the equivalent from AMD. However, going for a processor with graphics built in means it isn’t crucial that you have a graphics card.

Rounding out the thing is the things you put the data on …

You want two hard discs to run a Windows PC. You need a Solid State Device drive for Windows and hard disc heavy applications. They’re lightning fast at finding the data on the disc because there are no mechanical moving parts involved. I’ve been using Crucial’s SSDs for years and I think the one to go for here would be the 1TB NVME P2 drive at £90. The “NVME” part is important because it means faster access. Numpty here didn’t know that when I built Meltdown, so I have a slower one. A keyword here is “M2”, as these fit into a slot on the motherboard and can go faster. There’s a 500GB drive for £60, that’s the size of the one in Meltdown.

But … speed costs money which is why you need a data drive as well, especially if you’re gaming. When I acquire Horizon Zero Dawn, that’ll take up 100GB of space … Some games would go on the SSD though if they’re cursed with slow loading times (Battletech had to go on my SSD) but most of the time, you’re ok with a big normal hard drive. These are the classic spinning platters things with a reader arm that finds the data. It takes time for the arm to move around, which is why these drives are sloooow. Looks like my “new” drive is still on the market. It’s the Toshiba HDWD130 3TB drive available for £60 now. The keyword here is “7200rpm” as these pull the data off faster than the normal 5400rpm drives can.

And that’s the lot ! You need a bit more to build the PC. Windows 10 costs £100 at the moment for the OEM box. You will need a keyboard and mouse as well, these are very much personal preference. Oh and a monitor so you can see the shiny pictures. The keyword to look for in monitors is “IPS” or In-Plane Switching and it gives you far better picture quality and viewing angles. If you’re off the straight viewing angles on other screens, the filtering starts to have a massive effect. IPS is mostly immune to that.

Oh, speakers as well. Monitors tend to have speakers but they’re really, really bad. Get some powered speakers for your ears.

All the bits pretty much go together as It Can Only Fit In This Hole type things but it pays to read the Stuff through before putting everything together. Things like memory being best in some of the slots and working less well in others. And it’s definitely a Very Good Idea to test fit everything first.

Last bit of advice – electronics are less susceptible now to shocks but it’s very wise to earth everything before opening bags. What I’ll do is install the power supply in the case first, plug it in and very definitely leave it turned off … at the wall. Our UK 3 pin sockets give an earth connection through and with the power supply earthed, it earths the case. You then open the bags when they’re in contact with the case and make sure you have something fleshy (arms will do) in contact with the case as well. Everything’s earthed, no sparks should happen.

Woolly jumpers are not advised :-D.

I think that’s it for me for today. PC building isn’t scary but it definitely pays to research with sites like Tomshardware to see what the optimal bits are going to be. Bear in mind whether they’re trying to sell you something too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is parked on a desolate planet. The sun can be seen a little above the horizon to the left of shot. A thin band of a greenish atmosphere can be seen. The buggy is to the right of shot and our pilot is standing on a little rise to the left.
Sunset campsite

Good night everyone;

Picture. Meme. On the left is a computer monitor with indistinct white text on the classic blue screen of death. The back of a chair is to the right with two black cats looking over the edge, you can just see their eyes. They look worried. The caption is "Dunno what happnd. We dint touch it"
Oops

Hope nothing breaks. (Although I had Chrome crashing earlier while I was editing this post while a Tashnarr stream was on in another Chrome window). Stay safe, be well !

Trauma but Chill

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September 14, 2021

9:13 pm

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Hello everyone,

I managed to get an opportunity buy in at lunchtime today … There I was, finished with the usual Twit/book scan and there’s a little bit of time left before switching the work brain back on again. And one of the vendors has a 3060Ti card for £470. They didn’t last long, disappearing within about 10 minutes … but I’ve got one coming tomorrow. £470 is more than double what I thought was an acceptable price for a graphics card 2 years ago but things have changed there. I’m hoping for a good few years out of this one.

Picture. A cute green pocket dragon is standing on a red button labelled "PANIC". His forepaws are on the button, his back paws are behind and in the air. His mouth is open in alarm.
Don’t panic !

The picture is from someone else but the Pocket Dragons copyright has always belonged to Real Musgrave and co so that’s who I always credit when I nab a Pocket Dragon picture.

Anyway … upgrades have happened today in preparation for the graphics card arriving. I’ve had a couple of components for a good long while but have held off on fitting them for a few reasons. I’d always been able to get by on hard disc space with the 1.5TB drive that was in there before. It’s split 1TB for a data drive that has my games and more on it and 500GB for what got used for video creation. The new drive that’s gone in is a 3TB drive, so I’ll be able to fit in more than double the space for the games drive.

This is kinda important when being able to go for the newer, flashier games because they take up a huge amount more space … I’ve had to manage how much they take up by uninstalling a few as I go for different games. One I’ve had my eye on for a while is Horizon Zero Dawn, a game set in a future with a mix of bows and arrows and machine animals. It’s a fantastic game … and Meltdown hasn’t had the graphical power to handle it until the 3060Ti comes. But it also takes up 100GB on the hard disc which is a lot.

Meltdown is the name of the PC by the way, after it was being rather too hot when it was built on what felt like the hottest day of 2019. And it was getting pretty toasty … This was the situation in February this year when it had been running science sums for a while.

Screenshot. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 full bars underneath of varying colour from yellow to violet. A temperature of 88 degrees C is displayed.
Toasty

That was getting a bit too warm and I was getting concerned enough to stop the machine running the Asteroids at Home software which for some reason I haven’t figured out, makes the processor 10 degrees C hotter than the other science sums. 88 degrees C is getting close to the thermal limits and it’s one reason why I stop the machine doing sums over the summer. I don’t need that kind of heat in the room.

Anyway, that’s with the stock cooler that comes with the processor. How about an upgrade ?

Screenshot as before. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 empty bars underneath. A temperature of 33 degrees C is displayed.
What name now for Meltdown ?

The new cooler that’s gone in is a Coolermaster MA610P. It’s a hefty lump, almost too big for my case and it comes with a pair of fans blowing air through it. 33 degrees C for an idle temperature is really good. It’s around 20-25 degrees cooler than the stock cooler was on idle. I haven’t worked the system hard much yet. Not feeling like gaming this evening so I’m watching FuzzyFreaks play Deathloop (Twitch Link stream’s finishing now though). Back to reading after I publish this post. I did do a quick test though :

Screenshot. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 full bars underneath of varying colour from yellow to violet. A temperature of 52 degrees C is displayed.
What do you call something that ain’t melting ?

I have to say here that the AMD processor isn’t as clever with showing temperatures as the Intel processors. I’m currently on a chip that has 2 compute units, each with 3 cores within that can run 2 threads each. Whereas the Intel processors show you the temperature on each core, the AMD processor only shows one temperature for the whole chip. It’s not a big difference but the Intel way would tell you if one part of the chip was running hotter than the rest, which would tell you perhaps if the thermal paste was missing. (Thermal paste connects the chip to the cooler)

That 52 degrees C temperature is from Climateprediction’s set of sums. They have a nice long deadline on their sums, the rest of the sums people only give a week or two to get results back, so when you download the work you’re kind of obliged to send it back. That temperature will probably go up to 60 ish with Asteroids at Home. But that’s a test for another day.

One thing the graphics card change will do is let me turn the graphics options up again … Shinier pictures !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our diamond shaped ship is silhouetted, with a bright white neutron star hidden behind it. We see the streamers from the star going up and left and down and right. In the background, a sea of stars with a mottled greenish with orange clouding.
Ride the light

There we go. Searching for Pixels, visiting a nebula with a neutron star at the centre. Another stop on the way to the Core regions where the stars like to come out to play.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. It's night time on a planet. The flat outline of our pink spaceship can be seen on a landing pad to the lower left. Spires can be seen above and behind to the left. Top right, we see a reddish planet with lovely brown rings around it..
Stopping at Sacaqawae

Nice random assignment of landing pad there with the 07. That’s become text code for a salute around the internet. Picture the o as someone’s head the the 7 being an arm bent in salute. People like the symbology so if I get given pad o7, I’ll usually take a screenshot opportunity. This is one of the planetary bases between our bit of space and the Colonia region, which is 21,000 light years away and a bit West of the galactic core.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be dimly seen, with her lights illuminating small parts of a pink hull. Behind and to the left is a circle of a planet with part of a ring system visible. The planet is an odd black in the centre with a light blue circle near the edge tending to white at the outside.
No idea what’s happening there!

As the caption says, I have no idea what’s going on here :-). I think it might well be another of the lighting bugs that are still in the game. One of those times where you see something odd so you stop and take a picture.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink diamond shaped ship is on a rough landing pad at the bottom centre of the picture. The terrain is a light grey/orange. Hills rise in the distance behind the base. In the distance, before the hills, are a set of greenhouse type complexes. We're in the day time and the shadow is on our side of the ship.
Is there tea over there ?

This is where I stopped in this particular session. It wasn’t a main base but one of the additional settlements that have popped up with the Odyssey expansion. It’s good to see a bit more variation coming in. I think this was a Biological site with the buildings in the distance there being greenhouses. Perhaps they were growing tea for the local bases. Or coffee. Coffee is life.

I think that’s it for me for tonight, struggling to put the new cooler in, taking it out to connect the fans, putting it back in again has wiped me out. The thing gave me a scare because I dropped it but all seems good still. It’ll be good to be able to turn the graphics options up with the internet spaceships. I’ve been on a hybrid of medium and high settings, dialing it back from the Ultra that it was on before Odyssey. There will still be frame rate issues in places but the new card has around 4 times the parallel processing capacity of the last one and over double the memory. That means it can handle more complex environments and the parallel processing all goes towards creating the images.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Taps screen – is this on ?

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September 8, 2021

11:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since the last post ! I’ve had a couple of weeks away with work up in Scotland. Somewhere pretty :

Photograph. We're looking out to sea, there is a pebbly beach in front of us. The sun is high in the sky and reflecting off calm waters. A small triangle of a sailboat is near the horizon. There are a couple of occasional clouds visible.
No one prepared me for this

The usual rule applies with work related stuff, I don’t say what I work on here or what it’s about. Which also means being careful where the camera is allowed to point cos when it’s on the internet, there’s no control over it whatsoever. I’ve got a couple of pictures with features that would localise where I was to very little margin of error and from there, you just align it with the dates and you get what I was working on and who I work for.

Always have to be careful with that kind of thing because it can attract attention from people you don’t want attention from.

Suffice to say though, great bunch of people up there for the fortnight. Enjoyed it, got stuff done, learned new things. And it was incredibly sunny too ! We were really lucky to have such lovely benign conditions for our testing.

Oh ! I also injured my knee right at the start, twisting it as I was getting into my seat on the plane up. And then I did 80k steps on it over the fortnight. That’s down to an emergency buy of a knee support and being ultra careful not to aggravate it. I had visions of the knee snapping out sideways if I put too much power through it or if I landed on the leg the wrong way.

Almost better now though. It was good to be out and about though.

I did nearly post while I was out there, even going as far as copying over some Elite screenshots to the laptop. It was definitely a case of throwing everything into the daytime stuff though, not leaving much energy over for the evenings.

(Looks at last post) Erm, yep. Been travelling since that last post there …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. On the left, is a pin sized bright white star, throwing off curly streamers above and below. Our diamond shaped ship is on the right, hull part lit and part in shadow.
Basking in starlight

It’s always curious seeing new things too. Like comparing what I have in the internet spaceship to what we have in reality. I have a pretty decent control thingy now in the X52 Pro. Could be better, could be worse. (It’s a bit too sensitive around the middle due to game settings I can’t influence). It’s things like I have full 6 axis control in the spaceship. That’s pitch, roll and yaw that rotate you around the 3 axes. And a throttle for forward and back plus an up, down, left and right thing for translating around the 3 axes. So 6 axis – 3 see you turning in place, 3 see you moving around. The spaceship doesn’t interact with its environment as atmospherics are minimal in the game, although you do have to fight gravity.

Think of a car though and you don’t go up or down and you’re constrained by where the wheels want to go. An aircraft has to keep moving forward to make lift or it falls out of the sky. Unless it’s a special one like the Harrier or F35 Lightning II that can do Vertical Landing. (Or helicopters). Sea side stuff saw me around boats, which have their own special way of interacting with the environment to make them move around.

I still want to do that thing where I move away from the house and on to a boat. Lots of work to do on the house before I can even contemplate that though.

That’s one thing about the away trip, it forced me out of what feels like it’s become a comfort zone into a far more active mode. And I enjoyed that, partly due to a sense that we were getting stuff done. I’ve gone right back into that comfort zone since coming back though and need to break out of it again. Cos, you know, running low on snacks.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is landed on a very bleached white planet. Our purple buggy is parked in front, with my pilot standing in front of both. Everything is pointing to the right. In the background, we can see half a neon green banded with brown planet. It's just peeping above the horizon.
Mint Choc ahoy !

The voyage of the Searching For Pixels continues, looking for the special sights around the galaxy to see if there’s been much change since the Odyssey expansion. That’s one of the ultra rare glowing green gas giants, with this one being the Viridian Dreams system. One sad thing about this picture is that as I was descending from orbit, the planet was a gorgeous sapphire blue. That would have made for an amazing contrast. Sadly though, when I got much closer to the ground, the Odyssey graphics took over and bleached out the planet. Oh well. It does still make a nice piccy though doesn’t it ?

I got to another one of these as well later, which I’ll pop into a future post. It’s actually where I am at the moment and there’s a few more screenies to come first.

Oh, one casualty of the fortnight is one of the hard discs in Meltdown. It’s the ancient 250GB conventional drive that’s been grimly hanging on for the last couple of years. I turned Meltdown back on when I came back on the middle Friday to have a surprise of “it’s been a while, no Windows yet?” and it’s checking the drive for errors. I guess it probably couldn’t handle that time of not spinning and when the time came to reactivate, it couldn’t spin up. It’s no real loss, I’d pulled the data off a while ago because I knew the drive was failing. I do need to transplant in a new 3GB drive though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see our spaceship from underneath. We're looking at the gently curving horizon of a pinkish planet, with a thin atmosphere at that horizon. The sun is at the top centre.
Pixels on approach

Looks pretty, this was checking out a planet in the Conflux area. It’s a few thousand light years out and there are some abandoned settlements here.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is standing at the lower right, outside an airlock beyond which are corridors of a planetary base with a couple of dome like constructions behind. Our buggy is to the left by a gate and the spaceship is further off and behind. The planet surface varies between green and rusty red.
Anyone home ?

Now that we can walk around, I had to check. Nobody home this time and the doors were locked. I wonder if they left any tea or biscuits ?

I need to go shopping real soon. I’m running low on biscuits !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is lower centre, pointing left. To the left side, there is a red orange nebula that looks a bit like spread wings. Under or behind our ship are a set of very fine black rings with the occasional white ring stripe. In the distance to the right is a dark blue planet with tight white rings.
They put a ring on this one I think they liked it

I think that’s it for screenshots for tonight. I need to post more and catch up !

Good couple of weeks away. There’s a few completely unconnected things that were bubbling up in the mind too about things that have been happening in the world. Like seeing the racism feature around the cricket. There’s an increasing problem in the English game with racism. Yorkshire are getting the headlines at the moment but it’s wider than that. People of Colour aren’t getting the opportunities at the higher levels of the game that they used to. We need them in the game. Personally, I love cricket and want more people to enjoy the game, which means getting the opportunities to play it at the level they’ll enjoy and succeed at.

It’s fantastic to see Haseeb Hameed back in the England side and it’s always great to see Moeen Ali in the team. For Hameed, it’s part because he’s come through a trial in his game worse than pretty much anyone who plays the game. It’s great to see him beat that. It was even better to see his joy at being back around the England team. Like how Monty Panesar would celebrate when he got a wicket, it was pure absolute joy.

It’s great to see people like that enjoying the game. (I want to see Jofra Archer back in too, he’d be playing if not for his poorly elbow). But it’s becoming rarer now and a lot of that must be down to something filtering the players who make it to the higher levels. We had it in Lincolnshire where I played my earlier cricket. No one scouted our team. Ever, even when there was this young tearaway guy (me!) taking more wickets than anyone else in the team in just half a season, getting my name in the paper every week and contributing to a side that was winning most of the games and climbing up to second in our league. No scouting.

That’s not an axe being ground away by the way, I got a back injury that season too which restricted my bowling for the next year or so and then the shoulder injury came in a couple of years after that. The real axe to grind would be the university team. Performance in the bar was far more important there than performance in the nets.

I don’t want to be grinding axes though.

Good couple of weeks away. Great people. Good to be back and letting the leg heal up. Need to get out and about again and not just in the internet spaceship !

Photograph. We can see part of the brim of a straw type hat. Sitting on the hat is a blue fridge magnet, with "SCOTLA" visible, with the full word being Scotland. Above that, is a green serpent creature with coils coming in and out of the water behind a face with a cap. The creature is wearing a red and yellow scarf.
NESSY !

Yep. Couldn’t resist bringing this home with me.

Insert Post Title Here

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August 19, 2021

8:36 pm

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Hello everyone,

Gosh, a whole week’s gone by since the last post. Where did that go ? Gotta admit, I’ve been focusing on work stuff this week and then occasionally having some energy left over in the evenings that’s been part going on the games, part trying to stay relatively active despite having trouble readjusting to work day hours !

(I tend to slip the hours when I’m on leave, so bed at 2am becomes rather normal)

Oh ! Thumbnail time.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our metallic purple Cutter spaceship is on a landing pad in the foreground, pointing away from camera to the right. In the distance are two tower spires of a planetary base plus a scattering of other landing pads on the surface of a grey coloured moon.
Tiamat awaits

Yeah. Could be an internet spaceship heavy post today. Things are happening with work but you know I don’t tend to talk about that too much here for a collection of reasons. Apart from that, been listening to the music, playing the games and having that crazy thought of going round the galaxy again.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on a sunlit grey moon again, with a scattering of rocks on the surface. In the foreground, we're looking down on the upper surface of a somewhat diamond shaped dark pink spaceship. The horizon is capped by an orange fading to green atmosphere.
Pixels lives

This was where I went on the shakedown flight in the new ship, Searching for Pixels. The callsign is FUZZ3H after streamer lady Fuzzyfreaks, which is also where the idea for that particular paint job came from. This one is a Krait Phantom, outfitted for very long exploration runs. It’s almost to the level of Searching for Dragons, which had a 73 light year jump range (occasionally 76), this one can do 70.4 light years in a jump. She’s much more nimble too and there is a lot more visibility from the pilot’s seat.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink (with white chequer patterning) ship is on a landing pad pointing away from camera to the right. Behind and to the left is a grey ship coming in to land. In front of us are the buildings of a planetary base with a couple of tower buildings.
Busy port

I think I was going places to finish off the fitting for the ship. (Needed some repair machines to keep the ship happy).

Anyway, this trip is planned to be at least another 200,000 light years and I’ll be looking for pretty places too. Some of them will see me revisiting places I’ve been before. What I’m curious about is seeing what the differences are going to be between what we had before and the new Odyssey graphics (and all of its bugs that are still in the game).

In a very real sense, I’m looking for pixels with this mission and how they have changed in the game since my last exploration trip. (One of those times when a ship name hits you on the nose and sticks as perfect)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink ship is landed on a sun bleached white airless (no atmosphere at the horizon) moon. She is pointing to the right towards a blocky black ship that's part embedded in to the surface. In the background to the left is a dark blue planet, just on the horizon. The dark blue planet has rings going up and right.
Pixels investigates an unfortunate explorer

The crashed ship there is the Stranded Snake, an Anaconda ship of the same class as the Searching For Dragons that I went around the galaxy in. This is one of the special seeded mystery sites, where we have something custom generated instead of the usually procedurally randomly generated places. In this case, it’s a crashed ship with a rudimentary settlement around it. You can wander around and check out what they’ve added in. See if you can determine what happened.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same sun bleached airless white planet. Our character is standing on the black wrecked ship, looking into the raised section of the Bridge control area. Our purple buggy is pointing in with the lights on. In the distance, the dark blue ringed planet.
No signs of life on the Bridge

One major difference is going to be the ability to get into much tighter places than before, due to having that spacesuit available. I’ll be looking forward to checking that out as I explore and seeing what I can find. So that’s one major plus point to the new expansion. A negative is the performance impact of the changes. It’s not as bad as when you’re around civilised bases but there’s still poor frame rates when coming in to land. But I was ok on a hefty 1.9g landing today.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same planet as before but it's full night so we can't see much in the dark. Our ship's lights illuminate a portion of the aft hull of the crashed ship plus a small radio tower and habitation module.
Bit different in the dark

That’s how I logged in today for what ended up being a short session. Bit different in the dark ! I’ve visited the Stranded Snake before and this is how it was back then. One of the bugs in the game at the moment is in the lighting, so when it’s dark … it’s really dark. (Short session partly because my arm didn’t like a couple of long sessions last weekend, plus Fuzzy and Tashnarr are streaming)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is pointing towards the bottom left, heading away from a small and very bright blue white star on the right of screen. We can see the rear engine section lit up, the rest is in shadow.
Mission to Antares

The star there is Antares B, a companion to a red super giant star. There’s a screenshot on EDSM showing the two Antares stars together, with them appearing to be the same size on screen despite one being far bigger. (Big star far away, small star close). One of the issues in game is that while I can view the close star :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous, portrait format. Our pink ship is landed on a faded orange (more like cream) planet. There are a few rocky surface features and our rover is parked on one to the left. Above the horizon, we can see planetary rings which reflect the light of the small blue star.
Prepare the camp site !

The super giant star will be around somewhere too … but the lighting bugs mean that it appears black. Hopefully that’s fixed sometime soon although the frequency of patching has slowed drastically (might not be a bad thing, a couple were rushed out too fast). Multi star skies are fun to find. (Pitch Black was a great movie, must watch that again some time).

I’ve got a few interesting spots picked out for visiting as well and the Kamd site (linky) gives ideas for many more. But I’ll hopefully find a few more along the way. For today though …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous, portrait format. We're looking down on a pink diamond shaped ship, looking at the front. Our purple buggy is over to the right, with tyre tracks tracing a path behind. We're landing on a fairly flat area, behind in the distance it's far more rough terrain. Above the surface, we see the rings of this planet. Two more ringed planets are visible. An orange one near the horizon and a dark one near the top of the picture.
Bit toasty

I had a little look around before looking to set up the next hop but enacted the Stay At Home protocol. It’s a bit toasty there ! Think it was 1200 C on the surface and the spacesuit was complaining. It’s ok inside the ship though.

That’s enough from me for now. Bit of an internet spaceships again ! Not done that much outside of that. I should have more of a look at Alien Isolation.

I’ve been re-reading The Martian. If you enjoyed the film, I would thoroughly recommend reading the book too even if you’re just an occasional reader. It has a good light hearted style and has great explanations for what’s going on, diving down into the detail but presenting it in an understandable way. Oh and there’s a few sections that were removed for time from the movie which make a lot more sense in the book.

Reading is good :-).

Nite all, stay safe, be well.