Tag: internet spaceship

Quiet Staycation Times

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August 11, 2021

2:50 pm

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Hello everyone,

Picture. A cute red dragon is curled up, asleep on grass. A little bit of drool is coming out of his maw, which is cradled on his front paws. The letters "Zzzz" are above.
Indeed

(Picture credit – Anthony Peltier at the Artstation link. I can’t see anything about copyright there but do check out the link, there’s more than a few lovely pieces there)

Checking in again. I’m off work this week, which currently means trying to chill out as much as I can and generally regain a bit of energy. I’m not sure how much I managed to recover from the long term effects of the extended period of the skin condition that I had which built up a legacy of minimal sleep plus I think my internal resources got depleted while battling that.

And then there’s the suspicion of long covid effects from I heavily believe that I had it around April last year. The trigger for that is someone coming into work with something that would leave him hospitalised with severe pneumonia for a couple of weeks. This is at the start of the lockdowns, before effective testing was developed so we’ll never really know either way, especially with me being double vaccinated now.

Why do I think I had a light touch of it ? Any … and I do mean any above normal physical exercise or exertion would see me retreating to my chair for a lie down, while I waited for my temperature to come down and my breathing to stabilise. Shopping was ok but a bit of a push. I was having breathing difficulties for a few weeks, adopting the lie on your front strategy that I was hearing about (means the nasties come out of your lungs instead of settling within). I definitely had brain fog, plus a few more symptoms that I won’t go into.

I’m still here though, which is what counts, although I feel rather more limited than I think I should be. That might be a long term effect of living with a few problems though.

Enough about that though, what have I been getting up to ?

Enjoying a lot of Olympics for a start. It’s been a great games again, with a rather different atmosphere to normal. There were some crowds and support there, although it was mostly friends and coaches. It was great to see the competitors giving it their all in all of the sports.

I’m a bit mixed though on some of them though … BBC (providers of our coverage) tend to go heavily on Athletics and Cycling, which reflects where most of their presenters and expert summarisers came from. They’ll neglect the more fun and spectacular events to show stuff that I quite frankly, find really boring. I prefer skill in the sports I watch and … athletics and cycling don’t have that. It’s just about the physical prowess or in cycling, it’s about the technology a bit too much.

Sport shouldn’t depend on technology, outside of events like Formula 1 where they’re supposed to be leading the way in technologies that then filter down to the products that we will use. There shouldn’t be a gateway to entry like having a super high technology bike or outfit to use. Gatekeeping is bad in all of its various forms.

In contrast, cricket has an active development going on with the various gear but it’s kept mostly under control, the clubs will help out considerably with making gear available to new players and the better gear is just a minor help, it’s the skill of the players that makes the difference. Joe Root would still score hundreds with a £50 Kashmir Willow bat, I still wouldn’t be scoring hundreds with Millichamp & Hall’s best £700 English Willow bat. (English Willow hits the ball better but it adds a zero to the price). Anyway, if cricket were to come into a future Olympics, you could see teams competing on a tiny budget with shared gear and they’d have a chance to win, whereas you need megabucks to compete in cycling.

Yep. I have opinions on gatekeeping in general and especially in sport. When I was learning the game, I was using the pads and gloves provided by the club. I inherited a pair of old bowling boots from my dad, which did me until I could invest in spikes. That old pink box protector from a couple of posts ago must be over 50 years old. I started collecting my own gear later but that’s because you really don’t want to be sharing boots or gloves from a hygiene point of view (eww sweaty hands) and having all the gear meant I could practice more efficiently. But you could get involved with a club and have fun without having to invest in the gear.

It’s not just the gear though. Watching the Olympics, I was enjoying watching the competitors perform and how they reacted to their own great performances and also how they congratulated their competitors. Especially people like Sky Brown of the skateboarding, being the first to dash over and hug a competitor who had put in a winning routine. It’s great to see. Sometimes you don’t win, despite doing your best, because someone simply did even better. (And then there’s the cycling, which was marred by crashes and terrible behaviour)

Wait. Staycation stuff ?

I had thoughts of heading out again to Cardiff for a little wander around. I might still do that but I’m not sure how much I’d actually pick up there ? Maybe a better thing would be to find a castle to wander around. Fresh air and all that. I’m thinking aloud there … I’m also pondering heading to the cinema again, last time I did that it was in a different country on another continent.

There has been a lot of gaming going on …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're in Prague by night. The sky is clouded over and we're looking down a quiet street with a single car parked. To the right, the street continues through an arch. On the left, a building front is lit by a series of spotlights shining through the red leaves of a tree.
All quiet

I did manage to finish Deus Ex Mankind Divided again, unlocking the Foxiest of the Hounds (go through the game without triggering alarms) achievement to go with the rest of them. It’s still a great game, I’m glad I went back to it again early. It initially feels a bit clunky in comparison to its predecessor due to changes in the cover and creeping system but once you get used to that, it works well. This is one I’ll keep coming back to. Hopefully the story of Adam Jensen gets a third instalment. Maybe that’s the super secret Elias Toufexis (voice of Jensen) project is that’s due in 2024 …

One thing I had held off on playing because I didn’t think my graphics card was up to it is Alien Isolation :

Game screenshot. Alien Isolation. We're in a spaceship, looking at a lady sitting at a circular messy mess table. A passageway heads off to the top left. The scene looks very lived in with a pack of cards on the table, discarded cigarette ends in an ashtray and discarded drink containers.
A quiet beginning

You may recognise the ascetic there if you’re a fan of the Alien movies. You start off in the Torrens, a sister ship to the Nostromo in the first Alien movie. I’d held off on playing this one for a while, because I remembered how good the graphics looked in the videos. But I’m surprised at how good this actually is for a 2014 game. It’s actually older than my graphics card, which came out in 2016, when the pace of change in graphics hardware was still quite rapid.

I’m a couple of hours in and I’ve already gone into 100% stealthy crouch mode. This is another one that’s all about avoiding getting hit as Amanda Ripley, protagonist of this game (daughter of Ellen), is pretty squishy.

Game screenshot. Alien Isolation. We're in a control room, with angular shaped consoles in front of us, including a green screen monitor. Beyond, a dimly lit room has a model of a structure in the centre, the structure has several towers on top of a flatter base.
We are there

After the introduction, the game is set on the Sevastopol space station and you gradually learn about the near abandoned station and what happened there. It makes for a super tense situation and game, where you’re never sure if you should be talking to people or hiding from them or maybe even tempting them towards the hungry alien thing. Yep. There’s a Xenomorph on the loose …

It does look incredible though, especially for a 2014 game. That might well be a triumph of scale over ambition. What they’ve been able to do is focus the game into very small tiny areas which they can display in fantastic detail, instead of attempting to do the same in much larger areas.

Which brings me to internet spaceships … I’ve kinda had enough already of grinding through in Elite Dangerous, especially with the horrors of the Odyssey game performance. From what I’m seeing of various, even a graphics card upgrade wouldn’t assist there, as the performance is still terrible on higher end cards than I would actually acquire. It’s almost as if the game hits a cap in how fast it can update its environment. The ambition trying to go for far too high a scale than the game can deliver.

Whereas Elite is attempting to render a world as far as we can see, Alien Isolation’s levels don’t exist outside of the walls that we can see. That lessens the load considerably. That said, you’ve also got MS’s new Flight Simulator which does a fantastic job of showing us landscapes on Earth, which puts Elite’s efforts to shame.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're heading towards the circular docking entrance end of a space station. Various adverts flank either side of us on the way to a rectangular shaped docking port. Our Cutter ship is heading in, with purple flares from the engines and the occasional purple tint caught in the metal.
Tiamat arriving

This is me heading in to Newholm station in the Sothis system, with the intention of finishing off the steps towards getting the maximum Federation ranking. There’s no real point to that and no real reward, just another thing to tick off in the game. Oh and the missions will allow more gathering of the unique materials needed to engineer modifications and improvements to spaceships.

But there is that thought that the grinding for that, plus grinding for the top combat ranking plus grinding for the money for a Fleet Carrier ship starts making the game feel more like a kind of work instead of something fun and enjoyable. One thing I like doing in the game is bouncing around the galaxy seeing new places and new things. I get some of that with the Community Goals that are happening again and going for optimal trade routes to semi random locations is good too. But the best thing is finding pretty places in the galaxy to look at. I might well switch to that again and the ship would be the Searching for Pixels, callsign FUZZ3H. Yep, another tribute name again for Fuzzyfreaks who seeded that idea of having an offensively hot pink spaceship.

Game picture. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down from above on a vaguely diamond shaped ship. There is a notch in the nose for the cockpit plus the aft end is squared off for the engines. There are two line shaped constructions pointing forwards from the winds. The ship is mostly pink, with chequerboard white patterns aft and central.
Pink enough ?

That should look good in the screenshots. That’s the thing with the paint jobs I tend to go for … there’s usually a theme behind it (like the blue and yellow of Zoomnarr) but it’s mostly about having a paint job that will show up in the pictures. And light colours are better for that against the black of the void. This one might well see me jetting around the galaxy again.

Oh and there’s been a lot of Mars Horizon and Motorsport Manager happening as well…

About that graphics card … I thought I might be doing some upgrades this week. Graphics cards are steadily coming back on the market and into easy availability again. I had a 3060 Ti in the cart last night for £620. I could get a 3060 card for £480. BUT ! That 3060 Ti card came in at a recommended retail price of £370 and the 360 card should be nearer to £300. Some of those increases are down to cryptocurrency miners driving the price up, some is Brexit, some is Covid but far too much of it is the greed of the OEMs mandating higher prices for their cards to take advantage of that high demand compared to the available supply.

The £620 card (and the £40 sound card) disappeared from the cart. I don’t actually need it, outside of games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Deus Ex Mankind Divided which push my current card beyond what it’s comfortable at.

That’s the thing … if you don’t need to spend the money, keep hold of it. Other things may come along later and need the money instead. Like the series of jobs that need to be done around the house which I’ll need to get outside assistance in to help with.

That’s it for me for today. I might well do a couple of overdue upgrades on the desktop over the next few days when the cricket’s on. I need to get outside the house a bit too !

For now though, stay safe everyone, be well.

Crystal Olympic Shard Bugs

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July 25, 2021

9:39 pm

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Hi everyone,

What’s this ? Second post in a week ? I need to post more often, even if it is just internet spaceship pics.

Picture. Cartoon. This is a 2 by 3 set of panes. In the left panes, a single figure, shouting. The right panes have three figures with their arms raised, shouting. The words go : "Who are we?" "Readers!" "What do we want?" "All the books!" "Where will we put them ?" "We Don't Know!"
Yep. Need more book cases

Yep. Kinda between books but I know what the next one will be. It was nearly Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The start of his books tend to be the best and I was enchanted by the story of Nadia as she builds the earliest permanent Mars habitation. Red Mars was a really good one, the story kind of petered out as it went through Green Mars and Blue Mars. I think he’s an author with fantastic ideas about world building … but the overall plot line tends to suffer. Still great books though. I thought the world building in 2312 was fantastic.

Can’t find my copy of Red Mars though, I’ve either picked it up and put it somewhere not near the others or it’s one of a little collection that I lent out a while ago.

Anyway, next book is looking like an overdue reading of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which was a birthday present from CK. Can’t remember when !

Anyway, last book was The Crystal Shard, which was R.A.Salvatore’s first entrance in to the Dungeons and Dragons area of book. There was a cluster of these released to support the Forgotten Realms world building pack, with this one covering the forbidding area of Icewind Dale to the extreme North West of the Realms. It’s a cold place, with Ten Towns (literally called Ten Towns) filled with rowdy frontier folk who are more interested in a fight than teaming up against the invading hordes. And invading hordes there are. It’s still a very readable book, 30+ years on from when it came out and I’ll be moving on to the rest of them in due course.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We are landed on a rugged grey white planet. We're on the day side. Our ship is filling a landing pad in the lower centre. It's the purple Cutter ship with two engines on outriggers to the sides and a tubular hull. A decent sized settlement stretches out to the left of the ship. The ship is longer than the settlement.
Ship is chonky

I avoided playing games pretty much all this week. Temperatures in my main room were hitting 30 degrees C on my fan and the graphics card was up to 53 C at idle at some points. That’s about 7 degrees above where the point where the graphics card says things are ok. It’s 49 now. If games happen, the graphics card and processor need to do work, which means heat getting introduced in to the room. I could feel it in yesterday’s session (but continued !) and definitely felt it in today’s session.

They started off with a bit of ferrying around cargo, that’s the job of the Imperial Cutter class Tiamat’s Chariot. A fearsome craft, she takes on all pirates who come to try and rob her of her cargo and also takes a massive amount of cargo around. I’ve not been enjoying that quite as much as I have done before though, so only 3 cargo runs have happened this weekend. It’s Community Goal time, with this week’s ones being a Trade one (bring cargo for reward) and a Combat one (shoot pirates for reward).

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same grey white planet as before. We are looking back at our ship from the other landing pad. Our pilot stands at the bottom under an entry sign. The base consisting of blocky looking buildings is sprawling out behind us, with our ship on the horizon behind all of that.
Don’t leave without me !

Another one of Tiamat’s Chariot from the other end of that base. It was fun to see the scale of the ship here, especially as one of my pick up points for cargo was as well lit as the base here. Another thing I appreciated was being able to take the taxi around the galaxy. This is one of the good features of the Odyssey expansion. Before, you’d be able to request your ship be delivered to you but I thought this time, the ship is set up to make travel easy so I’ll go to the ship. This time it’s …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is heading away from camera. She is the Federal Corvette, a roughly triangular ship with a blunted off point at the front end. She is in purple with dark grey covers above the engines at the back. She's flying above a base with scattered domes and landing pads that's on a grey plateau, with orange lowlands in the background.
Alpha Lima inbound

The Admiral Luperza, a Federal Corvette class warship. She did alright in the bit of combat a week or so ago but I wanted to put some upgrades in. I’ve ended up rearranging the fit as well, so instead of two massive beam lasers and 5 smaller gatling cannons, she has 3 massive gatling cannons and 4 smaller beam lasers. The ships are limited on battery (capacitor) and the big beams drain that capacitor really quickly … This set up feels like it’ll have more combat endurance. Oh and I’ve boosted the range of the beam lasers as well.

I haven’t tried it out yet though, there are no suitable combat locations in the system where the Community Goal is ! Oops. There’s more work to do on this one, always more grinding to do in games like this.

Oh and I was very close to having another look at Eve Online, as it’s another one that has a definite draw for chilled out space trucking. Eve is pretty much pure pvp though. You have to be able to accept that style of gameplay to get the most out of it, which includes voice comms and patrols which have very strict demands on your time. I decided that wasn’t for me quite a few years ago and nothing really has changed.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our triangular purple Corvette is landed on a pad in the bottom right, pointing away from camera. In the distance is another collection of domes, with a conical structure with the top chopped off up ahead.
Awaiting upgrades

There’s a bit more to the Elite stuff, which I’ll close out the post with later.

Olympics ? It’s been good watching it so far, although with proceedings starting from about 12.30 local each day, it’s on a bit too late for me. I take advantage of the telly box being able to rewind an hour and then fast forward through the boring stuff, like filler segments and football.

I’ve been curious about the outfits again … The martial arts players have a set outfit that must get in the way :-D. Tennis highlights were just on … those look pretty normal. Hope they’re ok in the heat. Cycling will always be a sport for the lycra. Moving swiftly on. Then there’s swimming with the form fitting outfits and swim caps …

I think the big thing there is that all of the competitors should be on an equal footing, with no performance benefits being allowed from someone having a smarter technology behind their outfit. (Non-friction swimwear? Maybe)

I was curious about the gymnasts … Why do the ladies wear the leotards and the blokes wear the trousers ? Which one is better for doing the moves for their sport ? I know/knew a ex gymnast, she worked in the last team. I never asked her and it’s probably not a question you can casually pop into conversation ? You know ? Equality and diversity and all that ?

It’s always fun to see the archery people. They use hats. Hats are cool. And the Korean ladies were giving a scary sense of invulnerability earlier. Yep. Zombie apocalypse comes and you need people to take out zombies silently, get these ladies on your team. The skateboard people were like your typical cool street kid. It’s good to see them get their chances on as big a stage as this.

That’s the thing with the Olympics, it’s a fantastic festival of sport, where you find yourself watching things you’ll only watch every 4 years or so and they’re so compelling due to being right there with the competitors baring their passion for what they do.

Like the triathlon starting in a few minutes ! Things kick off early tonight so I better wrap up.

Bit more internet spaceship … I’m still invested in Elite. It offers a good chilled out alternate reality space to escape in to. And that can be valuable, especially in times like this. Wonder what I’d be like as a trucker in this world ? That would be a massive shift. And then it also has its exploration and combat side too.

But there are so many bugs … The most frustrating one is in the lighting system, where you’ll be heading to a planet and not be able to see anything at all due to it just appearing jet black. As in, it’s a hole in space occluding everything behind it but you can’t see the thing blocking the view. That’s perhaps the biggest actual bug in the Odyssey expansion. The abysmal performance isn’t really a bug, it’s just utterly flawed output from the developers. Here’s another of those bugs …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on foot, with the camera looking up at our pilot and beyond that, windows that mark the edge of the area we are in. Reflected in the glass is a small grey ball of a planet and a space station that is a mix of square and triangular faces that come together to form a cube.
Hope the windows are air tight

This is the bar, inside the concourse which is common to all of the space stations. The concourse is usually inside the space station … not floating around outside where the reflection of the station gets caught in the window. Where is that though ? Is it a reflection or a ghostly form of the station and planet ?

Who knows.

So many bugs. But it still has that hold on that part of me that enjoys flying around in spaceships.

Stay safe everyone ! Be well.

Melting, boiling blood, admin fun

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July 21, 2021

7:24 pm

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Hello everyone,

England is warm at the moment. As in un… I almost wrote unseasonably warm but July seems to have become our It’s A Scorcher month. There’s a reason my desktop PC got called Meltdown and it’s only partly down to me not understanding the instructions on the cpu cooler and initially installing it with a protective thing still on it (I’ll come back to that in a bit !)

Picture. Patches of tufty brown grass can be seen among thin snow patches on the ground. In the centre, a globe like lump with stones for eyes, a black thing for a nose and an open mouse. Two branches reach up to the left and to the right. Caption "It was at this moment I realised ... There is such a thing as being too host." It looks like what's left of a mostly melted snowman.
Indeed

Yep. We’re having a toasty week and the only time this week I’ll be in air con is Monday and Tuesday just gone. (Work trip). That’s one reason the graphics card buying hasn’t happened yet (oh and they’re too expensive and rare still). Not gaming much at the moment because that just adds heat to the room. The upgrades coming by the way are :

Cpu Cooler swap. I’ve had a better one for a while but this is a sizeable job because the motherboard needs to come out to do it. It’s almost more efficient to swap everything over to a new case which I might need to do anyway for :

Graphics card. I’ll be upgrading from an ageing 1060 3GB card up to a 3060 12GB card. It has at least 3 times the parallel processing power, which means it can push more pixels around and do more Make Everything Shiny transformations on to build up the picture. The extra memory means it can hold a shinier picture and better looking textures. But I might need to get one that’ll be an uncomfortable fit in my case.

Hard disc. I’ve actually got one of these ready but I need to a) install it, b) copy everything on a drive over to it c) swap them over. And I’ll need to do that when I’m not using the desktop. So I’ve held off on that one.

Gosh, can’t remember much more and I’m definitely missing something. That’ll be the heat …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the inside of a space station. It's a bit battered and shabby with everything having an orange rust tone to it. We see our ship on the landing pad. This is the Corvette, which is a long, thin dagger type ship with a wider centre where the cockpit rests on top, a thin front (closest to camera) and a wider section at the stern where the engines are. This one is in purple, which looks pink in the lighting.
Admiral Luperza awaits

There we go. That’s the Admiral Luperza, which had a little outing trying out the combat side. The game actually did ok with the combat, although the lighting bugs are disastrous at the moment. The best place to find a series of fights in Elite is to go to Resource Extraction Zones in the rings around planets. They’re giving a rating according to how hostile a zone they will be, so you can find your level. It works well for the gameplay. However … the lighting bugs in the Odyssey update mean that the planet can be black, the rings can be black and you have no idea how close you are to them due to black things on black background. It’s an issue. I could get round this in combat by enabling a Night Vision mode, which adds a green border to everything.

Here we go :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We are landed on a dark planet. We're looking at the port side of the ship, which is pointing upwards (landed on a slope). Part of the ship is illuminated by the lights of our pilot standing in front. The ground is dimly lit, there is a faint atmosphere showing at the horizon and an arc of a planet above.
Bedding in for an evening

This is how the game looked in the debug camera mode and this was considerably brighter than the black landscape I was looking at from the pilot’s seat. The lighting is another known, crippling, issue with the Odyssey changes.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the port side of our ship, in the sky above the planet. The guns are out and we see a big laser cannon at the top of the back of the ship. There are a series of red running lights along the hull. The planet is a rugged light grey. The atmosphere can be seen at the horizon in green fading to blue. In the sky is a planet patterned in light and dark stripes.
Fangs out

That one is the same place, a little bit earlier as I was coming in to land. It’s had the touch of the GIMP with an Auto White Balance. It worked pretty well ? This isn’t the brightness level I’d expect but it’s far better than the brightness available. It’s a bit disturbing that the lighting in the external camera is different to the lighting from the cockpit …

Anyway. Pretty game is still rather pretty if you can find a place that allows the game to show off the graphics and there are numerous bugs and downright broken stuff getting in the way of that.

Oh ! I’ve managed to get myself distracted …

Admin fun – it looks like WordPress have pushed an update out and the Waterfox browser I use most has started refusing to load the Add New Post thing. So I’m writing this on Chrome. It’s handy to have an alternative. Waterfox (it’s a fork of Firefox) has been a good browser over the years but it does have problems running some sites and others (like Youtube dashboard) just say NO when you try and use it to access them.

Hopefully I’ll get that access back soon.

Cooler thing ? I mentioned that earlier … Computer coolers have advanced a lot over the years. In the old days, it used to be a spring clip that would attach to two hooks on either side of the socket. Now, you have a bracket on the underside of the motherboard under the socket. The cooler sits on top of the processor in the socket and a screw at each of the four corners go all the way through the motherboard connecting it together from above and below. I missed the instruction that said to remove a compressible protection thing from the backplate, so it wasn’t going together correctly. (It has to be firmly clamped to take the heat away). No permanent damage – phew !

Blood boiling ?

That’ll be the Olympics.

There’s a number of unsavoury stories coming out about the Olympics. I’ll let you look them up or you’ve probably heard them already. I’m not going to repeat them too much here. One is about the composer of the ceremony music, who has been exposed as an extreme bully. Not a good look for the organisers.

There are an increasing number of stories about the organisers being way too proscriptive about what the competitors are supposed to be wearing. And this is where the blood starts boiling.

Unless you are required to wear specific things for safety reasons, you should have full choice on what you wear if you are doing a sport. So a sailor will wear a lifejacket and harness if they’re on deck because we don’t want to lose anyone over the side. And that goes for the racers too. Motor racing people are bedecked in fireproof gear and wear a crash helmet. It’s to give them a fighting chance to survive in a crash.

For my own sport, protection is mostly optional. It’s the choice of the player as to what they wear. Personally, I went by the maxim of “If I wear too much, I will get hit more” because I trusted myself to get out of the way. But I always wore the leg pads, the box for my bloke bits, the gloves and I started wearing a helmet after a freak ball to head incident. Picture ?

Picture. The background is a (dusty) wooden floor and there is a white coloured wall behind. Two white cricket leg guards are propped up with a cricket bat between them. There is a helmet on the floor in front and a pink ball protector on top of the bat handle. A glove is draped on each of the pads. There is a lot of padding on them.
Not used those for a while !

Cricket leaves it mostly optional with regards how much protection people use, although I think it became mandatory for kids to wear the helmets. With the cricket, it’s a really bad idea to face a cricket ball without the pads, it’s not a matter of If you get hurt, it’s when. Similar with the gloves, they’re there to take the impact of a cricket ball that will break fingers. And the helmet is there to take the energy of the ball, instead of that energy going into your head. But this is all I wore, I tried an arm guard and got hit more with it, same story for thigh guards. I’ve seen someone get hit in the bit that the pink object protects and he was down for quite a while. (I was hit just to the side a few times)

A couple of examples in the cricket – Mithali Raj (superb Indian cricket lady) used to bat in a floppy hat and I adored her for doing so. Cos I used to bat in the floppy hat too and there was a kinship thing there. But it wasn’t about the floppy hat, it was a highlight watching this lady bat because she was incredibly skilled and it was great to watch. Same with Sarah Taylor, absolute legend of a wicket keeper (best I’ve seen of men and women players), I used to have a pang of “I want to watch what she does because it’s awesome but I don’t want to see her get hit on the head and hurt.” Sarah Taylor used to go by not wearing the helmet because it slowed her down but switched to keeping in the helmet later. A lot of the Asian cricketers go to caps or hats when batting against slower bowlers and take the helmet off.

I applaud them for their choices, either way. It’s a sensible balance of risk against the danger. It’s their choice too, they’re aware of the consequences if they get hit and they accept the risk involved. Oh and Mithali Raj was still playing for India in the recent series against England and was giving an exceptional show with leading the way with her batting.

But this is the other end of the scale. Yep. Mandate gear if it’s safety related. I’m all for that. We should have our sports people able to compete to the maximum without fear of getting hurt. And that goes for reducing the amount they wear when it’s really, really hot. (I’m thinking of tennis people here)

Cricket let one of the mandatory outfits for women crickets go quite a few years ago. The one that enforced above knee skirts. URG. It’s good to see them go in favour of the ladies being able to wear ankle length trousers instead. There’s a safety thing there as well, the exposed skin is far more vulnerable to cricket balls.

And then we get to the stories coming out of the Olympics …

One was from a few weeks ago and it was about the caps that the swimmers are required to wear. Swimmers with Big Hair not being allowed to wear suitable sized caps. Let them ! It’s identity. It’s their character. We need our sports people to be Characters and not just faceless individuals forced to squish into a mould. If the big cap slows them down, that’s their choice. We shouldn’t be forcing them to look a certain way.

Olympic sport should be all about who is the best on the day and that’s in performance, skill and how they manage to bring all their talent at their sport out. Sometimes they blow it. Applaud them anyway and give them your support again next time. They work really hard to get to where they are.

It should not be about the show. Cricket’s previously been doing really well because the players of all codes have been spectacularly bringing it lately. From Harleen Deol’s catch on the boundary, England’s all round class with the ladies and some spectacular stuff with the men as well. Their appearance is just a side show, it’s not something we should care about. I don’t watch women’s cricket because of any thought that the players might be cute, I watch it because they play a game I love with considerable skill and passion. They’re fierce competitors and it always makes for a compelling game to watch.

And then we come to the beach volleyball and what’s happened with the Norwegian Ladies. They want to play in shorts instead of the bikini bottoms. And they’ve been fined for it. I AM SHOCKED.

This is where the blood starts boiling. I guess that the skimpy clothing is justified because it’s hot and sand gets everywhere. And then Something gets involved and instead of it being a test of skill, it’s about a sideshow in skimpy outfits.

When I’m watching sport, I’m invested in who’s going to win. And that’s being really happy for the one who knocked it out of the park and was better than everyone else and being sad for the one in tears because they tripped up right at the start and didn’t let their talent out to play that day. They’re both awesome. It’s better to try and fail than not try. When I’m watching the endurance motor racing, I’m more likely to be rooting for the people down the field who have lost huge time to mechanical issues and they’re fighting to stay in the race. They tried, failed and then try to recover. I have massive respect for that.

I’m not interested in what they look like, although Happy Smiling People make me happy too. Oh and if they have distinct character too, like the ski jumper with the enormous moustache. Loved that.

The sooner we can get away from archaic attitudes like mandatory outfits for things like sport the better. It should be the player’s choice for what they wear for their sport and they’ll optimise their gear choice to make them better at it. The only thing that should matter is where there might be a performance benefit coming in, like a bigger bat, gloves that let them catch unfairly better or prosthetics that have better tech then the competition.

Erm. It’s hot I kinda ranted.

Make your own mind up with the stories about sport at the moment and the really bad looking ones around the Olympics. Watch sport for the skill, not because you fancy the players or you like watching people in skimpy outfits. Respect the performance, not the appearance.

And I’ll now retreat back into my Not Wearing Much (get that picture out of your head for your own sanity !) and trying to keep functioning in the heat. Roll on Saturday :-D.

Random Rovering

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July 12, 2021

9:53 pm

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Hello everyone,

Lots been happening in the sporting areas lately hasn’t there ? Yep. Stunning catch by the Indian lady was the absolute highlight. Here we are. It’s well worth linking up for you. (Harleen Deol catch on Skysports). I saw it happen live and even though I’m an England supporter through and through for all things apart from one particular sport, I was seriously impressed with what she pulled off there. It was something special, probably the catch of the decade. I don’t think we’ll see a better one this year.

But wait, we need a thumbnail pic.

Game screenshot. Mars Horizon. We see the orange landscape of Mars, with orange buildings in the background, a circular habitation module to the right which is on leg stilts, a white rover with 3 axles on each side and in the foreground, an orange and white flag with a stylised cow on it.
Perhaps not the space game you expected !

I’ve been in the other game too. (Oh and the typing was going somewhere random there so unobserved weirdness may have ensued) Space games are in a bit of a sad situation at the moment. Elite is suffering from a vast number of issues but at least it appears with an announcement from the CEO that they might be turning a corner there. The advice still stands though : Don’t give Frontier any money until you are completely assured that you will get a quality product at the end of it.

I nearly spent money on X4 in the steam sale. That game has issues as well, although its style feels like it’ll be one I could enjoy. Star Citizen is very far from being done at the moment, or even basically playable. I do have a few more like Empyrion, where I have ideas for ships to build but no real inclination to build them. I had another look at No Mans Sky but that feels more about the wandering around planets than finding pretty things in space. So I’ll continue with Elite for now but with most of what I do in there now, there’s a reminder of the flaws that are currently in the game.

Oh and I need to acquire another graphics card so I can go back to some of the newer things and play them with the graphics turned up. Like a second playthrough of Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I enjoyed that one first time around but I’m saving the next run for when I have more pixels to play with.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is on a rise to the left, looking right towards a purple buggy that's parked in front of our silver spaceship. In the distance there are three spires of a base, to the right behind the ship is another smaller dome. There is a thin atmosphere giving a blue tint to the horizon.
Having a little look outside

I had a little look around a base in the Kremavi system. It’s on one of the improved Odyssey planets, so it has a thin atmosphere causing the shading towards the horizon. This base is also on a tidally locked planet, so the base is in permanent sunlight. The Buckyball racing crew have adopted it as their latest race base, which involved landing the ship 5km away, having a little foot race to the buggy, racing the buggy to the base, flying a ship through the base and flying a fighter through the base. The current leading time is 5 minutes 16 seconds. I’m not going to make an attempt, my game performance is nowhere enough to think about it.

Oh ! Yep. Enjoyed the cricket. The F1 racing has been interesting this year as well, with a resurgence of Red Bull. One big difference between Red Bull and Mercedes in F1 seems to be the potential of them making mistakes. Red Bull’s mistakes tend to be on track incidents, although they’ve somewhat dealt with that as Verstappen has matured and as they have gone through some terrible, ghastly even, drivers. Apart from that, Red Bull’s strategies are perfect and spot on when they go reactive. Mercedes have an unfortunate tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, like the German GP when they did a celebration, forgot they were actually racing and had a bit of a disaster.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is driving away from camera, lights illuminating ahead. The buggy is driving between base buildings, with a series of landing pads on elevated platforms ahead.
Just on a Sunday drive

Not actually Sunday, actually Monday. Performance in the buggy was “ok”, I’ve turned the antialiasing off (it blurs the lines) and it’s made things a bit better. They’ve attempted a graphics kludge to try and make things better … but I think it causes the game to crash so I turned it off and had no crashes since. No antialiasing though means the bitmaps have nasty graphical dot artifacts in them, happily the jpeg compression hides a lot of that.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is to the left of shot, looking to the right. In the distance are a pair of tower skyscrapers with square windows lit by white lights inside. Not all of the lights are lit.
Anyone home ?

One thing about this little jaunt, the base was empty. As in absolutely devoid of movement. You don’t really notice it as you’re wandering around and there are occasional ships coming into land at the pads that encircle the base but on the ground, there is nothing. That’s a little sad but it would mean more thought and processing power needed to make the buggies and people happen.

I’ve been enjoying watching the cricket too. It’s a symptom of what’s going on that the England cricket team needed to pick a completely fresh squad for the current one day internationals as Covid got into the previously selected team. It’s still a Thing, even if people seem bent on ignoring it.

It’s not going away, if anything the Delta variant is hellishly dangerous. The virus doesn’t care what we think of it, it just wants to spread … and Delta’s unlocked a way of it spreading even more dramatically than before. The lesson is – get vaccinated … and even there, keep being cautious. The virus has shown it mutates readily, it can mutate to having more impact on the body as well as being more infectious.

Oh ! Cricket stuff – I have watched some of The Other Big Sport Championship (not Wimbledon). I was unlucky enough to tune in as one of our players dived and got the penalty decision that saw England go through to the final. The big reason why I don’t watch football now is the cheating inherent in the game. Even with the video refs, they can’t get rid of it.

Cricket has managed to pretty much stamp it out with the decision referral system. There are still some odd decisions that happen but compared to even 10 years ago and especially before neutral umpires were introduced, massive mistakes and perhaps deliberate errors happen. There’s no debate now with the decision referral, the ball tracking seems much better and the sound and camera system make it very clear whether the ball’s been hit or not. The only tricky bit is whether a catch very close to the ground has been held cleanly.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our buggy is facing us, shining its headlights into the camera. The local star is above and right of shot. There are two small cylindrical towers, plus lower flat buildings. Behind the buggy is a round building with triangular sides up to where the top is flattened off. A spaceship is near the sun.
Sun light, star bright

It still looks really pretty. But once you see the issues in the game at the moment, you can’t really ignore them. I don’t think there’s any big ones in that shot though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our purple buggy is in front of shot. The silver spaceship is parked behind, pointing to the left. There is a hill to the right and the star is poking out above the hill. The spires of the base are visible in the background. There is only one set of tyre tracks behind the buggy.
Look behind the buggy …

That was at the end of my little joyride. I had missed the Flawed Thing in this one until someone pointed it out in one of the discord servers … I don’t think I was driving on one set of wheels …

I thought this post was going to be a bit random, more so than interleaving the buggy pics with things like sport. Only one more buggy pic to come though.

In other news – finished Shadow Caption by Alastair Reynolds. Good book. Good middle of a triology. I read Silversands by Gareth L. Powell, which is a standalone scifi book set on a colony of Earth in a galaxy with gate wormholes between planets … which have randomised destinations. So the colonies exist independently and cut off from each other. Silversands was a very fast tale, a quick book and a pretty darn good one too. I’ll keep reading Gareth L. Powell’s books. He’s a great guy too, local in Bristol, fairly active on Twitter and I’ve had a few very pleasant interactions with him.

Oh ! I was going to comment on how things Look. When you’re doing things, are you concerned with how they Look to others ? I am. It’s why I don’t rant much here or indulge in talking about stuff like politics too much. Ranting isn’t a good look. Neither is hooliganism, which we’ve been seeing as the other thing that hopelessly mars football as a sport in this country. It’s about that face that gets presented to the world. Is it one you’re happy people seeing ? Is it something that will come back to haunt you in a few years due to the Internet not forgetting anything ?

I’m quite happy with the face that I hope I present. Although there is that constant of the face you present not necessarily being what other people see when they look at you.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our little buggy is parked facing to lower left of shot. The headlights illuminate the words "KEEP CLEAR" painted on the ground in front. Behind, there is a domed building with a few more taller buildings behind. There is another to left of shot plus a small tower in the background. We can see the sun peeking out behind the building to the left.
Not good at following instructions.

Perhaps the antics above present a face of “Rebel”.

Stay safe everyone, be well. It’s tough but the crisis is far from over, keep that caution up.

Seeking Space Adventures

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July 4, 2021

9:45 pm

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And other things too.

Where did I leave it last time ? Ah ha ! With the Lego R2D2. That was a good little build that and I definitely appreciate the clever, simple, slick mechanism for the central leg plus it has a few other things hidden in there too for tool arms and a fully rotating head. This could be the first Lightmybricks kit I go for, although I should probably go for the Porsche and the BB-8 light up kit too. Thumbnail pic ?

Game screenshot. No Mans Sky. We are looking on a rugged yellow landscape with occasional rocks and small red spiky plants. The sky is a very bright yellow.
Wait … different game ?

That’s actually No Mans Sky, which I had another look at yesterday. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Elite Dangerous is in a very bad way at the moment. There’s been a series of patches since the Odyssey expansion was unleashed on an unsuspecting customer base and they’ve been very up and down in quality. The latest effort was introducing an AMD technique as an attempt in plastering over some of the massive cracks in the game at the moment. It hasn’t worked. I’ve actually turned it off now because I think it was crashing the game.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be seen lower right, facing away from camera towards a tiny selection of buildings on the centre left. The landscape is barren grey and the horizon is just at the top of screen.
India Charlie Echo inbound

I’d been playing around with the various paint packs that I have available and this one works pretty well in all lighting. It’s like the Cadbury Clipper photoshop thing I did a while ago, where I did a graduated purple aft fading to white forward. This is the Cutter ship again, named Tiamat’s Chariot, callsign DL.SDL. There’s reasons for all my ship names, they’re often tributes. Tiamat was the Queen of Dragons, so it felt fitting that her name be part of the name of my flagship.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My ship is on a landing pad close to camera, pointing away and to the right. She is in the shiny purple livery this time, although it looks black with purple highlights. There is a smaller white ship behind and to the left on another landing pad. Assorted base buildings can be seen up and right.
Empire representing

I had an opportunity here with the Imperial Clipper that’s landed on the pad that’s a bit further away. The Clipper is the less expensive sister ship to my Imperial Cutter. Great ship too. If it were smaller, I’d look at it for being a landing ship. Anyway, this shows off the shiny purple paint job … It’s a stunning looking paint job, if you get the right lighting for it. I can’t use it for spacey screenshots because it just disappears into the background. However …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our Cutter ship is in the lower half of the image. You can't see much because the ship rather fades into the black background of space but there are various silver highlights of parts of the ship, plus the star light is making small points of light reflect in the purple hull.
Set course for the next star

This one looked good. I was avoiding a White Dwarf star here. These are very old stars, which have gone through a nova phase and the remnant left behind that explosion does not have the mass to become a neutron star or a black hole. More about them at the link. In game, they’re a fairly dangerous and annoying object because you come out of the jump right on top of them and have to steer a wide berth around them to progress. You can get a boost off them but you have to get dangerously close. I don’t think it’s worth the risk (and annoyance!)

The reflected lights did look rather spectacular though didn’t they ? I have to admit though, this one has some processing to increase the brightness and contrast, otherwise that shiny purple disappears into the background of the void.

I think I’m on the verge of skipping to something different though. Elite’s got big problems at the moment, both within the game and especially within the publisher. A graphics card update will address some of the issues. Those are coming on to the market but the prices are still too high. A 3060 card on release was around £370 (still high), these are back on the market again but the prices are around the £550 mark. Scan had some for £470 … but I don’t absolutely need one yet so I’ll wait a bit longer. Anyway, when driving the buggy around today, I was having issues with the control of it that I’ve never had before. It was essentially racing out of control probably due to the shocking frame rates around populated bases.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the aft end of our spaceship heading out to the exit of a space station. We see purple engine flare and blue light reflected in the hull.
Trouble Dog, departing

This is the latest ship, a Python class ship callsign TRBLDG. More on that later. Gonna talk about books :-). The Python is a great all rounder in the game. She has a roughly triangular cross section from above and behind, with mounts for 5 guns on top and an armoured shell. They can land anywhere and this time, the ship is fitted out for carrying passengers. This is the next step in trying out the money making schemes … plus I haven’t done it before.

But I am kinda looking for a different space game at the moment. Elite’s got a lot of flaws and I haven’t really been enjoying the game play loop grind lately. I have to either vary it or have a certain mission to go for. Before, it was finding shiny things to look at while bouncing around the galaxy. At the moment, it’s getting the credits to buy a carrier ship and then I’ll take that exploring again with a selection of support (mining for fuel) and other ships.

The other games out there are the moment of note are No Mans Sky. Which has come a very long way from another bad launch. However, it feels very much like a ground game that happens to have spacecraft in it and I think that’s why I keep bouncing off it.

The obvious candidate is X4, the latest in the universe set up by Egosoft. I’ve had most of their games over the years but never really put much time in to them. They always seem to have their own bugs and issues in their gameplay and that appears to be true with X4 as well. It has its devoted fans but I know my history with the previous games where I just don’t get on with them, combined with what I’m seeing from reviews about the game having its issues.

Star Citizen is another one … I think this game will be ready this decade. And yep, there’s 9 years to go there. It’s a massively over ambitious project that hasn’t come out with anything really worth playing yet.

There are other games in the Steam wishlist. I should probably have a look at Frontier Pilot Simulator. This one isn’t done yet but apparently has a lot going for it. It’s not strictly space … but it is a space colony that needs pilots to take cargo around. Sold.

We’ll see. But first, another look at that new ship …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same place as before, except we are looking backwards into the space station interior at the bow of our ship. The blue lighting reflects off the chromed hull.
Mutt of Mayhem, departing

There we go, this is the Mutt of Mayhem. The name comes from Gareth L. Powell’s Trouble Dog trilogy of Embers of War, Fleet of Knives and Light of Impossible Stars. It’s a great trilogy. Very gritty … very dramatic. It’s another that bounces between characters and places as it goes but it uses that to great effect to aid its pacing and to allow the story to develop in a very well judged time.

Oh and all bets are off as far as the characters are concerned. A character you were convinced was going to be around for all 3 books might see a sudden end. I dunno about you but not plot armouring all of the characters adds a lot to the drama. One central character of the books is the ship, Trouble Dog, a Carnivore class cruiser which leaves active naval service due to the events right at the start of the first book. I’ve felt like borrowing the name for a tribute for a while now. Thoroughly recommend the books.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a barren grey brown landscape. We see her port side, looking left. There is a shadow under her silver hull. In the distance are the domes and spires of a planetary base.
A base to race ?

I might have a closer look at this base before going on the passenger grind … This is the Mutt of Mayhem parked in front of a base in Kremavi which has been chosen as a new race track because it has convenient access and is in permanent sunlight. A definite bonus for taking pictures.

Books ? I finished Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds. This is the middle book in a trilogy set apparently in a very much future solar system, where all of the planets have been dismantled to form a multitude of settlements and other treasure hiding places. The dominant space technology is to have solar sail ships ply their way between the stars. It’s very much pirates in space, with the ships owing a lot to the old sailing ships with broadsides of cannon. It works pretty well as a setting and I’ll look forward to reading the conclusion when I get round to it. Book 1 – Revenger, Book 2 – Shadow Captain and book 3 is Bone Silence.

The next book is another Gareth L. Powell. It’s his Silversands and although short, it’s exploded into action right from the start. I’m looking forward to getting back to it, which will happen in 5 … 4 … 3 … 😀

Cor, toasty out

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June 14, 2021

5:55 pm

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Hello everyone,

We have that traditional British thing at the moment where it’s flipped over into a bit warmer than the average and we’re suddenly all declaring that we’re melting. It’s the houses …

Meme picture. A big golden coloured dog is lying on the floor, facing us. He's one of the dogs with big jowls that flow down from his mouth and very long ears. They are folded out over the carpet.
Toasty indeed

After a few intense feeling weeks through work to make things happen, I have a week off this week. First one since early April I think. (Can’t remember, must be sign that I needed it !) The work stuff all came to its conclusion last week and while I can’t say what it was, everything worked, we got our Thing done and it actually worked a bit better than I expected. Good times.

It was really toasty though. We were in places that aren’t really designed for the conditions and they’re getting a bit old now too, so not as much ventilation as would have been ideal. It was good to have the day out of the work from home office and see things working nicely.

What am I intending to do on this week off ? I need to do a decent amount of work around the house but am waiting for it to cool off a bit before I do that. I don’t do at all well in the heat so I need it to be a bit cooler. Our places are intended to retain the heat so it’s better in the winter. As an example, my graphics card thermometer is what I tend to go by. 40 degrees C is a nice temperature where I’ll start taking the jumper off. It’s reading 50 degrees C at the moment and my latest fan is saying that the place it’s at is 27 degrees C.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is facing away from camera, all engines firing. The right hand side of the image is all yellow orange sun, which reflects off our ship. There is a small dot in the upper part of the image, it is our enemy ...
Duelling by the sun

Not quite as hot as there. Mining in the Manic Minarr isn’t being too profitable at the moment, so this is me back in the fleet flagship, Tiamat’s Chariot, running cargo missions and turning the tables on wannabe pirates. It’s been good too, 2 kills gave 2.5m credits and some valuable salvage. It’s a nice supplement to trading legs which are about 4m to 8m profit at the moment.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is on the left in a mostly cream coloured tight fitting spacesuit with dirty yellow highlights. She has blue hair and is facing away from camera towards a small ship waiting on the landing pad. It has a mostly grey livery with blue patches and the word "APEX" in white.
Taxi !

I needed to wait for Tiamat’s Chariot to be delivered to where I was though, which meant taking a taxi ride to unlock one of the new engineers for planetary operations.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My character faces away towards a floodlit base. We see the entrance gate with a sign saying "Olowe's Workshop". We see buildings in the background, lit from inside. A thin red line of a targeting laser is going through our character.
I hope that isn’t a targeting laser

The place I randomly chose was a planetary base. I couldn’t get into most of it, didn’t have the clearances. But it was good to be out and about and looking around. Performance of the game has improved markedly since release but it’s still nowhere near what it should be. I’m getting perhaps 20 frames per second while walking around.

But I’m keeping the gaming time a bit lower for now. Pushing those pixels around makes the graphics card make heat and introducing heat into already warm rooms isn’t a good idea.

I do want to get out and about properly over this week. Like seeing something in the cinema again for the first time since Feb 2020. The offerings last year didn’t really appeal too much but there are more promising things at the moment like Godzilla vs Kong, Raya and the Last Dragon and I’d count A Quiet Place II if I’d seen the first one. Cardiff is looking like a potential place. Oh and that would mean a decent amount of time in an air conditioned car too :-).

Now that I have the reading glasses, I need to be getting back to the reading too. Reading makes no heat ! No heat is good.

I’m going to leave it there though before I dive into things like our country likely needing to put restrictions on movement back in again soon. We were doing well for a while with our case numbers going down but in the last week, they’ve started ticking up again. I was kinda surprised that crowds were allowed at the last Test Match plus I think crowded pictures at gigs from oh! 3 weeks ago has a little bit to do with the uptick in that part of the world.

Hope everyone involved in those upticks gets better soon.

I’m going to put the dinner on now and refill the glass with ice cubes before settling down to the latest edition of Sun-Kissed with Tashnarr, Tessachka and Omgvandi being storytellered by TheWanderingInn in a Vampire the Masquerade game. Is good chilled out stuff, much better than your average evening telly.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Mouse, Ouch, Glasses, Trekking

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May 10, 2021

8:06 pm

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Hello everyone,

I need to get back into the habit of posting more often again ! I’ve won something …

Picture. On a cream fabric jumper there is a box and a computer mouse. The word Corsair is on the top left of the box. Bottom of the box says "Sabre RGB Pro Champion Series". The mouse is black with a rubberised wheel. Standing on the cable in front of the mouse is a little dwagon with an apron. The apron has a cartoon style drawing of a pretty blonde lady going Yay.
Mouse acquired !

I won it in a giveaway run on Tashnarr’s channel (Twitch link). Tash is a lovely lady and I’ve been watching her streams for a couple of years now. She rapidly became one of those people who I’d switch over to her stream as soon as she comes on. She has a blast playing the games and it’s infectious chilled out fun that brings a great community along as she goes. And Tash has fantastic engagement with that community. It’s not just Tash having fun with the games, it’s Tash enjoying us having fun watching too and joining in with daft things in the chat.

Mouse ? I set it up this evening after closing the work laptop down before having a play with a little photo editing there. So what I did for this one was :

Set up the jumper (including attempting to remove all wrinkles and folds for this mark 2 version !)

Make the pose happen. The mark 1 had the dwagon too low, hence propping him up on the mouse cable this time.

Tricky bit … Set phone camera to a 10 second delay …

Hold a pen light in a suitable place to banish the shadows from the sun coming in the window …

Juggle phone camera and pen light while the countdown is happening.

Sorted ! I think it came out ok. Oh and don’t worry about the framing when juggling the pictures like this. Modern cameras have a ridiculous amount of pixels so if you capture stuff outside the border you want, just crop it to size. (Also rotate and scale). I use GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), it’s free and does what I need on the photo editing, although it does have its usability quirks.

The ouchie though is one reason why I’m not doing any gaming tonight. (That’s ok, am enjoying the Tashnarr stream). My shoulder was starting to complain through yesterday’s Elite internet spaceship travel session so I wasn’t going to be in there today. But my back has apparently decided to join in as well today. Not as in big pain but more like that promise of deep pain and being on the floor after an injudicious movement. So I’m being careful in how I move again and how I’m sitting. (Probably perversely brought on by sitting more normally this afternoon !)

Spaceship ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a brown coloured moon. The ship is to the right of scene, we're seeing her port side. The buggy is in front, pointing to the right. We see the milky way galaxy ribbon stretching out left to right above the horizon.
Shadow camp

This is me starting off from the Fire and Ice system over in galactic south east. There’s been some epic trekking going on …

Picture. Galactic map for Elite Dangerous. We see the map of the galaxy from above, with the spiral arms stretching out. Earth starts in the lower centre. A line of white dots goes to the centre and back. It then stretches to the west and around clockwise to the top, curling round to the right and stops at the south.
Almost there !

That’s the latest travel map from yesterday, which saw me reach the furthest extent of the Outer Arm Vacuus. That’s the spiral arm that’s next out from the one we’re on. There’s a curling back of the line again where I had to circle around in order to find a region of stars that were navigable between the two spiral arms. Limited hop range and all that and not enough stars to hop between. Next stop will be to the south with the faint green line showing the intended course. Oh and ignore the red line, that’s from the map software picking up a hop done in the Elite Odyssey alpha. Definitely ignore the faint spreadsheet type thing over to the left hand side … Caught out by a partially transparent map !

Glasses ? Yep. New glasses coming. I had the eyes tested on Friday and they both went back in ok. I need to switch to two pairs of glasses, one set for reading and one for more normal long distance but I was expecting that. I’m getting to That Age you know. It’s a shame to lose the magnetic clip on shades thing but no one seems to do those frames any more. A pity because it made it far easier to choose new frames. Instead of looking at a whole wall of frames, all I needed to look at were the ones with built in shades. I’ll go reactalite adaptive instead because I don’t really need to control the shades/no shades like in the cricketing days.

I’ll do a suitable picture at some point when they arrive. I was already having thoughts about how I could get the dragons involved in that.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. This is the Australis Ferris Wheel. We see the ship landed on a brown dirt moon, port side towards the camera with the buggy in front. Top left sees a dark perhaps violet planet and stretching out from it is a white ring system that goes to the horizon of our moon.
Australis Ferris Wheel

That’s the Australis Ferris Wheel and was well worth a stop on the way. The planet in the background has a moon that has just enough inclination in its orbit to put it above the ring system. So instead of seeing a thin line of a ring, it stretches out before you like in the picture. Is pretty.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Same planet as before. We're landed on the dirt moon looking at the back of the ship. The curved end of the ring is in sight at the horizon. We see two huge rectangular engines with the upper hull places above. There is a flash of orange hull with the landing legs behind.
Does my ship’s bum look big in this ?

After taking a similar picture from the Odyssey alpha, I had the idea to do this one as well. You can’t walk around in the main game yet but if you could, the pilot could walk under the gap in the middle of the aft landing legs and reach up on tiptoes to touch the underside. Scale is a fun thing :-).

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the upper portside of the ship facing towards the camera. Above is the ribbon of the milky way galaxy finishing at the right just before a bright yellow orange sun.
Playing interstellar fireworks again ?

That’s the view back from the Semotus Beacon, which is the furthest point reachable at the end of the Outer Arm Vacuus. No more traveling away, it’s all towards home now. (Shoulder and back permitting !)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is in the centre, pointing downwards. Colours are all washed out by the power of two suns. Up and right is a white/blue star. To the left is an orange star.
Sun bathing

This is Red vs Blue, a pair of stars of which one is a Herbig Ae/Be star. That’s a protostar, very early in its life. The game representation is probably not too correct, they’re supposed to have gas dust envelopes for formation or discs of matter. They look great though in game, although I was nervous about coming out of the jump around a twin star. Too many stars close up lead to the ship getting too hot.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed, with portside towards camera. The illumination is showing off the colour scheme of orange at the back, ochre yellow in the middle and grey towards the front. The buggy is peeking out of the ship's shadow towards the front. There is a shallow impact crater behind the ship. Above the horizon is a gas giant mostly in shadow with an arc of the sun visible on the right. We see the rings going from the tip of the horizon up and right. Above the gas giant is a smaller looking gas giant.
An Eock Hypue campsite

This is where I left it yesterday after probably too long a run. Maybe. 🙂 (I was close to the next waypoint and wasn’t finding any promising candidates to stop at).

Oh and then we go figuring out the way to the next waypoint, which needs a couple more boosts to get there. The route I’m following was intended for people with Fleet Carrier support, those can go 500 light years in a single jump. Searching for Dragons currently does 73 light years to a jump, with options for 91 and 109.5 light year jumps. (I don’t have the bits for the longer jump). So I’m a little restricted compared to that. It’s felt like an achievement being able to get to the places I probably shouldn’t have been able to get to … but it’ll be good to get back to doing something different in game.

That’s what the spreadsheet behind the galaxy map was for, it’s my route to Amundsen’s Star at the southern tip of the galaxy.

But that’s for another day, hopefully when my back has settled down a bit !

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Walking, racing, jumping … skating ?

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May 3, 2021

8:29 pm

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Hello everyone,

We just had our May Bank Holiday weekend, which meant … more time off work ! I spent mine variously looking at the Elite Odyssey Alpha and motor racing. There was nearly a peek at more remote control car models but that can wait a little bit and I don’t think I know enough about them yet. Oh ! I have an eye test booked in for next week, which is massively overdue.

First … thumbnail pic ? Hope it works this time !

Picture. This is a Lego model of a pair of figures dancing on an ice rink. The rink is circular and shaded in clear light blue flats, with most of the model being in white. There are two trees and a drinks stand over to the right. One model is a blonde lady with a red scarf, the other is a chap with a blue beanie hat. A dwagon looks on from the left side.
Dwagon does not know how to skate

It’s one of the Lego VIP models that came with the Space Shuttle. A smart little construction underneath there too. There are another set of cogs underneath, so if you turn the lower cog that’s sticking out, the dancers go around the rink and twirl around.

I did the deed with the Elite Odyssey expansion and bought into the Alpha … I’ve had a little look at it over the weekend but honestly, I don’t see how much is there for me plus it needs a massive amount of work before it can be considered for release. Hopefully that’s already been done because apparently the build we’re playing on is at least a month behind the one the devs have. (They must be testing the netcode out)

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see our pilot there, in front of an immense landing leg (with a pair of pads) that she could walk under. The bulk of the ship is to the upper left. The scene is inside a landing area with a roof.
Mustn’t bump my head

The scale of the ships is impressive. This is the latest expansion and the Alpha allows us to walk on planets, space stations, landing pads but not inside the ships yet. The game didn’t let me walk under that landing leg but it was fun seeing that the gap there meant I should have been able to stand under it. The detail is curious. Some of the Alpha stuff has incredible detail, some is …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. In the background is a white gas giant with brown/orange highlights. It has burnt orange rings. Our ship is in the foreground and we see it from behind and above. The ship is mostly trapezoidal, with the side parts being orange and the middle stripe in white.
Tea 89 on an Odyssey

The quality is still amazing but the ship should be better … and you see the difference in levels of detail when you’re close up. Could be bugs, it’s probably me having special livery items that aren’t properly in the alpha version yet. Like the “TEA-89” identification labels that should be very visible. I tried a couple of missions involving retrieving an item from a base (no screenie apparently, game must have lagged out the pressing of Button.) and getting into a wrecked thingy.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We are landed on a moon with a white surface. Our little pilot stands in front of the ship that dominates the right side of the image. (Orange wings, white stripe, we see the ship from the port side). There is a moon just above the horizon and a small wrecked object to the left.
Time for salvage !

This was me looking to retrieve an item from a crashed satellite and running into one of the issues … Cut off the access panel and the access panel falls into the hole and you can’t get it out. Oops. There’s also terrible performance which is apparently down to the game attempting to render too much, although it felt like that improved when I turned supersampling* down in the second session. Oh, the thing to look for in the detail is the edging between ships surfaces. It looks positively crude compared to what’s in the current state of the game.

*Supersampling – creating the image at a higher resolution than it is displayed at. This leads to better detail at a cost of performance. I play at 2560×1440 pixels. Supersampling at 1.25x means the game creates (renders) the image at 3200×1800 pixels.

So that’s me walking …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My character's avatar is in shadow, standing in front of the camera. On a sofa behind her sits a gentleman dozing off. People are gathered together over to the right and through a window behind, are shop windows and displays for the concourse of a space station.
He’s missing the action !

One thing that’s caught attention is this fella, dubbed Peter the Sleeper, which makes me a little more relieved again about the choice to move my name on from Sleepypete and make Sleepydwagonman the more consistent online name. (Plus there are a bunch of Sleepypetes and only one Sleepydwagonman).

More stuff that was going on was the return of World Endurance Championship racing. It feels like this series might be dying off, although it was good to see the debut of the hypercars. The race had interest all the way through, although the organisers are probably contributing to the series dying by locking the coverage of it behind paywalls. IMSA provides a superior product with better racing across all classes, better commentary and you can actually watch all of it, rather than the paltry amount that the Eurosp…. people deign to show. It’s sad because it’s selling short the efforts of the people bringing the cars to make the races happen.

Oh and then there’s F1, which had a decent race this weekend too. I’m looking forward to the Nurburgring 24 hour race coming up in a month. That’s always got interest going all the way through the field as cars fall back for repairs and then come back through.

Jumping ? I carried on with the quest to circle the galaxy, today’s trip was a bit more convoluted because it needed a bit of careful navigating and boosted jumps to hop across the gap between spiral arms. Back to the main game !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see a wedge shaped warship in a Shipyard selection screen. The ship is mostly white, with purple shapes painted on towards the forward end.
Admiral Luperza in the Odyssey shipyard

That’s the Admiral Luperza (named for Maggie Krohn) in the Odyssey shipyard ship selection screen …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the Federal Corvette ship on a landing pad from port side and above. Same colour scheme as previous but with additional grey black detail present and much more detail seen on the hull.
Admiral Luperza awaits

If the Odyssey release sees the ships having the detail of the one in the Shipyard picture, instead of the detail that’s in the main game, something will have gone seriously wrong. Still, it’ll be nice to have another dimension to the game and I’m anticipating fun being the getaway pilot with a little ship that’s set up to get into places and then quickly make an escape, while the people keen on the ground stuff have their larcenous fun in bases.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in the shadow of the planet in the background. We can see the dawn rise arc to the right. Our ship is lower centre, seen from port side. A cluster of engines above and small patterns of lights betrays the presence of a carrier ship.
Visiting the Reginleif

Stopped off and repaired at the DSSA Reginleif carrier today, before heading on to :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a grey surfaced moon. We see the ship from the forward starboard quarter and can read the name "Searching for Dragons". The buggy is below the ship and a small blue planet is just peeking above the horizon.
Earthrise ?

That’s where I stopped tonight, a surprise Earthlike planet to check out a couple of jumps away from the carrier.

Hope you all had great weekends !

Stay safe, be well.

Zoom Zoom and Alien Hunting

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April 26, 2021

8:28 pm

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Immediate squirrel moment after realising that when one of the standy up legs fell off the keyboard, I put it back in the wrong way. It wobbled. It doesn’t wobble now that I’ve fixed that.

Hmm. Curious way to start ? Just a random squirrel moment. Keyboard’s doing fine actually. It’s a little stiffer than I got used to with the Steelseries keyboard but it’s been good since I got it. One big advantage is that whereas the Steelseries keyboard was essentially a closed unit, the ADX keyboard has unenclosed keyswitches so you could clean the dust out with an air blaster.

Outside of the work, I’ve been enjoying a few games … Elite is still a big one :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. we see the port side of our ship from the rear. The two engines shine bright with a bluish white trail behind and a couple of X's of light flare coming from the engines. Across the top of the picture we see the Milky Way ribbon of stars and there is a small part of a yellow star above that.
Set the controls for just around the sun

That was me setting off from the extreme Eastern Edge of the galaxy. I’ve set course for the south now, reaching the end of the white dotted line below.

Picture. We see a map of our galaxy from above, with the bright central core in the middle with the spiral arms coming out from that centre. There is a white line showing my course and a thin green line showing my planned route.
Helm ! Follow the green course

The white dots are where I’ve been. It still includes an earlier trip to the Galactic Core and a couple of speed runs there. Those are the white lines to the centre of the map, plus another going off to the East a bit where I wanted to see some different things on the way back. My galactic circumnavigation course started by going to the West, diverting off a couple of times where the Kamd site told me there would be fun things to look at. It then goes North, following a spiral arm, while diverting off a couple of times to see more fun stuff. Up at the top is Galactic North and the systems Beagle Point and Salome’s Reach, which are the most northern stars that can be visited in the game. Off to the East is Magellan’s Point, the most Eastern star we can visit in the game. I had to divert around the end of the spiral arms to a point where there are enough stars to jump around. And then the green line shows where I’m needing to divert around another gap between spiral arms.

More pictures to come later and Yay ! Managed to figure out how to get ED Discovery to present this as a good looking map instead of the colour regions that it defaults to.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed and we are viewing it from the port side rear. There's a lovely shadow under the ship on a pink-ish looking surface. Up in the sky is a large dark moon with a wrinkly surface and in the background and farther away is a smaller looking but actually much larger gas giant.
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear

That was where I started off on Thursday, on a mad dash to fix something I’ve been missing for a little while.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is in shadow and we view her from below her port side, looking slightly from the front. The buggy is back and in the shadow of the ship, towards the front. In the sky there is a dark moon. On the left there is a yellow star shining bright, with a tiny blue one directly underneath. The blue one is throwing off streamers in a thin cone to the left and right.
The Nye’s Bow Tie System

This is one of the systems on the way, the Nye’s Bow Tie system, so named after a celebrity scientist who likes his bow ties. There are two close entry stars here that we see on the left. The yellow one is a normal main sequence star (Our star is a main sequence G class star) like our’s. The blue dot underneath with the streamers is a neutron star, a star that has exploded and collapsed into the smallest stellar object, but without the extra mass to collapse it further into becoming a black hole. We use these in game to jump longer distances, my jump record is now 304 light years in one hop. I used a Star Trek calculator to work that out (curiosity and geekiness) and apparently it is around Warp Factor 570 on the old The Original Series scale. (I don’t like the new scale, it doesn’t make sense to me).

But on we go again, I’ve kinda entered crazy travel mode in Elite now. I’ve been on this trip since November and want to do something else in game now, especially with the walk on planets expansion coming relatively soon.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the ship from the starboard side, lit by the headlights of the buggy to the bottom left of shot. Buggy and ship are landed on a dark shadowed planetoid. To the right, there is a purple-ish gas giant with rings going upwards and a little to the right.
Camping by the stars again

This is where I left things on Sunday, having remembered to give the buggy the neon red paint pack again :-D.

There has also been Motorsport Manager going, I’m closing in on winning the GT car championship which will be the point where I jump into the Endurance racing championship. It’s a great game, development stopped on it a few years ago and they’ve gone back to making mobile games. It’s a shame there hasn’t been a Motorsport Manager 2 on PC, although they did such a good job on this one that it is still an incredibly good game of its rather unique type. It’s my go to game for when I’m not feeling great and want a game I watch more than play.

XCom2 has been a fun one, although I think I’ve hit a point where the challenge is going out of that campaign. I haven’t hit the end stage main campaign enemies yet but I’ve eliminated all but one of the specials from the expansions. And those special characters are pretty silly, unless you know what to do and what not to do. Games like XCom tend to be a bit chess like, especially since the remakes came out. There are timers to speed you up on the missions but you need to apply a fair bit of patience, or your people get caught out and then bad things happen.

Game screenshot. XCom 2. We see the walls still standing of a futuristic looking but devastated interior of a facility building. Bottom left is "Katie Petersplays" for our currently selected character and there is a yellow outline traced in a rough circle.
Mission : Destroy Base. Almost there !

The aim of this mission was to destroy the alien facility … I think we were mostly there already. Grenades are fun in this game, although you get moaned at for using them because it means less loot to carry away. The currently selected character is Katie Petersplays, another one named after a streamer I started watching about a month ago. Her specialism is mind powers.

Game screenshot. XCom 2. In the background is a landed air vehicle which has just dropped off six soldiers who line up in front of the camera. Below that, are boxes with their names and statistics from the campaign.
The A Team

That’s the top team that will build into being the end of game team. I’ll do a full roll call when I finish the campaign but from left to right, we see :

Colonel Luperza, Spaceviking. This one is modelled on the lovely Margaret Krohn who is making the Ashes of Creation game as well as being one of the driving forces behind Roll4it and all round lovely person who I had the pleasure of meeting at Roll4itCon 2018. Oh ! Luperza’s job in this team is to run around and chop things up with a sword.

Colonel Crendor, Skittles in the bright yellow beanie and blue armour. Crendor’s job is to be the team medic. I’ve been enjoying watching his various Blood Bowl 2 games.

Colonel FTL, Dr Feelgood. This character is for Josh aka GamingFtl, who I also met at Roll4itCon 2018. Lovely fella, with a great voice that he can turn into Deep Evil at the drop of a hat or turn of a tache. Specialist FTL’s role is master hacker. If the enemies turn up with robots, he’ll hack them and turn them over to our side. The nickname this time was randomly applied by the game and it just felt perfect. Oh ! When he’s not being at the centre of chaos in tabletop games, Josh is helping create the game Clone Drone in the Danger Zone.

Colonel Freaks, aka Spiderqueen. FuzzyFreaks is our sniper on the team, a crack shot with the long rifle and the pistols. She’s also one of two streamers who I will watch whenever she’s on, whatever she’s playing. She’s a fun one and also lovely person (Another meeting at Roll4itCon 2018!)

Magus Petersplays, aka Shark. Katie is a pretty new addition to the team, joining as the psionics expert. I picked up on watching Katie as part of a Roll4it table top show and have been having huge fun watching her streams as well. (She’s west coast US though I think which means late late streams for us in the UK)

Major Cyberkitten, Truthseeker. Probably a Colonel in the game by now. Truthseeker is the grenadier, who will make the aliens pay if they cluster together at all by sending little packets of Boom over. Also has a very large gun. Cyberkitten has been a very good friend for a couple of decades now.

All the links there will take you to their Twitch channels (not CK!) which should point you to more of what they do. Cyberkitten’s link will take you to his blog, which is always good to catch up on. They’re all fantastic people, which is one reason Brain went towards customising a character for them. Check ’em out.

Yeah ! XCom 2 definitely still has that “Just one more mission” factor still. It’s a tough game, it can really punish when you leave a person exposed. It’s a long game though, so I won’t play it again for a while after this campaign.

You’re probably thinking – isn’t it a little weird to name the characters that way ? I find it actually makes me enjoy the game more. I’ve got a selection of name lists that I’ve acquired from places, like Mass Effect names, Yogscast names, Totalbiscuit’s old name list … It’s good to see the names pop up and the interpretations from other people. I’m also running a decent amount of mods in there for more customisation. I’d rather have Colonel Luperza or Colonel Tashnarr (another sword character) than the randomly generated names. There’s more of a connection to the characters, albeit you have to remember that it’s a completely artificial connection.

It’s been fun making up the character bio stories too and there has been a few chuckles when I’ve posted them. I’ll put out a full roll call at some point.

How have I been doing ? Weekend was rough honestly. I think my brain was steadily frying towards the end of last week and then on Saturday, I moved a few things around in the house which I think led directly to massive dust inhalation and trouble breathing. Saturday’s sleep was Real Bad. Sunday’s sleep was better.

I’m out and about tomorrow though, which should mean lots of fresh air hopefully. It’ll be good to head out again.

And I’d better hit post and sign off there !

Be well everyone, stay safe. Enjoy what you’re getting up to !

PS I just started my pre-publish check, saw the galaxy map picture again and thought “It would be a great idea to go up one spiral arm, cross over to the next and return on that one.” Hmm.

Quick ! Escape across the border

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April 18, 2021

8:10 pm

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TLDR – I came back again.

As the general plague situation around here improves with the numbers going down, we’ve got more options to get out and about again … So last Monday, the various shops opened up again, as did the border across to Wales.

I like Cardiff. It’s got a lot more interesting places to look in than Bristol does. Oh and there’s the sweet shop and …

Picture. A shop front seen from the outside. It's the Lego shop with boxes of wares stacking the shelves and a selection of completed models (2 Porsche cars, tree house, blacksmith house) in the shop window.
Happy Place

Yep. Found myself outside the Lego shop again but there were a few more places on my list of shops to visit.

The trip happened on Friday, for a few reasons … Work’s one of the big ones. We’ve been busily sorting things out plus I was in catch up mode after having the previous week off. So I held off until Friday mostly for that. Friday tends to be a half day, balancing the extra hours spent logged online during the week. I have lots of flexi credit to burn at the moment …

There were other reasons too. If the cabin fever was getting to me, it was going to be affecting all the other people too. Apparently Cardiff was busy on Monday and Tuesday (Lego Shop Lady was chatty). Things had a chance to calm down a bit by Friday.

There’s also a factor of wanting to have a decent amount of time to wander and see the various shops. Kinda failed on that one on Friday. You really want to be disappearing from Cardiff around 4pm at the latest on a Friday and earlier is better. Even 3.40pm was starting to push it. There’s a good motorway going by Cardiff, the issue is getting to it. The roads out aren’t great and get clogged up very easily. (I need to find another way out of the city instead of the one the satnav likes !)

Oh ! Reasons for going into Cardiff :

Antics Model shop – I’m highly likely to get a radio control car before the Summer really kicks off. The trick will be what to get and I need a lot more knowledge and information before I commit any money there.

Wally’s Delicatessen – has sweeties … more later.

Music shops when I find then – I’m always on the lookout for more albums to add to the collection. There is an HMV in Cardiff but it’s a bit out of the way. I’m still hunting for places to browse though.

Troutmark Books – found them again ! They were open. Happy feels. I didn’t buy any books on Friday though. The foggy mask tends to put a dampener on the book browsing but they do have a great selection there.

Oh and the Lego shop too. Loot happened …

Picture. An assorted selection on top of a rather large box of Lego including yellow and pink bonbons, lemon sherbets, candy mice, pineapple cubes, kola kubes and all butter fudge. Plus Lego (in the main text)
Much loot

The assorted sweetie supplies will hopefully last a little while again. I couldn’t resist the thing in the big box at the back (Lego Space Shuttle) and my eyes were gradually increasingly opening up as Lego Shop Lady kept getting more things out of the cupboard. Yep, the ice scene, plane, helicopter bag and boat bag are all freebies. They’ll take a fair while to put together :-D.

One has already come together. I quite enjoyed this one last night.

Picture. An old red plane is on a stand. It has a single wing above a circular (for Lego!) fuselage with a single propeller up front with two blades. A Lego figure in on the stand wearing a brown flightsuit, holding a map. A dragon is to the left, wearing a flight cap and goggles.
Chocks away !

That’s the Amelia Earhart model that was available to Lego VIPs. Nice model, the VIP and Creator kits have lots of nice touches and a great finish.

It was good taking the car out and about too. I’m learning its quirks and what it can do. The voice command thing feels like it has improved, although I have no idea how much I’ll use that. It also logs the journeys and uploads them to a server, which I can check to see how I drove. (Although it has a km/h vs mph bug that I’ve reported back on).

I have an idea for a place to take the car too that’s away from the beaten track. This one comes from Friend BionicDwarf who takes fantastic pictures of the sky. Yep, place is well away from overhead lights that hide the stars. I’ve been making progress in Game too, heading round the galaxy … Leg 3 is complete, next direction is towards the south of the galaxy.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the port side of the ship, above an Earth like planet to the bottom right. Above the ship, we see the ribbon of the Milky Way galaxy.
On galaxy’s edge

That’s Searching for Dragons looking back from the galaxy’s edge. There’s a system tagged Void’s Brink there, which has a single Earth Like planet about as far out as you can get. We can see the Milky Way galaxy stretching out before us there. But it’s not quite as far East on the galaxy as you can get … I had to give up on this trip before because I didn’t have the range or materials to get me out there. However …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is on the left, we're looking from behind at the top of the ship. On the right and further away is a larger ship, with a blue nose and yellow landing pads on her main hull.
Put the kettle on please !

That’s Magellan’s Pub, a fleet carrier that someone has based out at the most eastern star we can get to in our galaxy. A good place to stop off and …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the forward starboard quarter of the ship, landed on a dark brown planet. Above the ship there is a formation that looks like a white cloud.
Next stop, Magellanic Cloud

That’s me stopped at a planet at the edge. I think that white smudge thing is one of the Magellanic Clouds, a sub galaxy off the edge of our one. But I need to know more about the geography of our local galaxies to know that for sure. I couldn’t get the info from asking Google yesterday.

It’ll be good to head back and see the stars.

Time to hit post though. Keep your guard up against this plague (maybe 50:50 of the people out on Friday were Special People who don’t believe in keeping their mask on) and hopefully soon we’ll see each other out and about and at places like cinemas again.

I miss cinemas. Not been to one in 14 months.

Stay safe everyone, be well.