Tag: ship

Advent day 11 and we’re shipping

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December 11, 2024

10:37 pm

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Hello everyone, door number 11 ?

Picture. It's our advent scene, with the models scattered behind a grey and red ship on top of a dice. The ship is in the shape of a double triangle wedge with a tower at the back. Our red dwagon is to the left.

Today’s model on top of the d20 there is a Venator class Star Destroyer. It’s the ship that made a debut in the Episode 2 movie, Attack of the Clones and it was the precursor ship for the iconic Imperial Star Destroyers from the original movies. The basic shape is of a triangular wedge, with further triangular sections at the back before the engines come in. The actual ship has two control towers, although the tiny model can only add one.

It’s a pretty good shape for a space battleship, as having the triangle like that means that all of the guns on the sides can be pointed forwards for lots of firepower. The Venator’s thing was to be a fighter carrier as well, so that red stripe in the middle covers a huge hangar.

With today’s model being a big ship, I thought I’d go back to the cruise :-). And bring out the ship pictures ! I saw a few on the cruise this year and some last year too, from grey ships to cargo ships to ferries and cruise ships. First up …

Picture. We're in a port terminal, in the foreground is a pair of escalators and our little red dwagon perched on a dividing wall. In the distance, the blue and white with red funnels cruise ship Borealis.

Yep, gotta be Borealis. This was from the final port, where we stopped in at Lisbon and another moment spotting a place where I could set up a good picture. I like this one (Although Ellardy could have done with more light there ! Maybe need to grab a friend with a torch next time)

Picture. We're looking across a grassy area of the port towards a huge cruise ship. She's somewhat white but with the sides broken up by an absolute wall of glass cabin windows.

Sharing the port with us was the big P&O cruise ship Iona. Whereas Borealis is 231m long and 65,000 tonne, Iona is 344m long and 184,000 tonnes. That’s a similar step up to the difference between Borealis and last year’s ship, MS Maud at 136m long and 16,000 tonnes. Maud (now Midnatsol again) is a small and very cozy ship where you could happily wander through the decks and chill out. Borealis is a bit bigger again and it was still lovely to wander through her decks and go outside on the Promenade areas and generally chill out either inside or outside. And we were looked after very well by excellent crews on both ships.

Would Iona be a similar experience ? I’ll just have to check that out at a later date :-D. One thing I want to try and avoid is being on a party boat and Iona is listed on the P&O site as being Family Friendly. Could be a bit too young a catchment. Will have to do more research ahead of the next cruise. I’d happily go on Hurtigruten (either ferry or Expedition) and Fred Olsen’s ships again but I’m wanting to go to varied places and see what it’s like on the various ships. (That’s a couple of recommendations by the way!)

Going back a year …

Picture. We're looking across open water towards a ship encased in a dock. They're working on her with assorted bits of scaffolding and cranes. The ship is large and grey, can't make out much except for an A530 on the stern.

That’s HNoMS Maud, taken from cruise ship MS Maud. She’s a fleet tanker in the Norwegian Navy auxiliary fleet and is very similar to Britain’s Tide class tankers. It was a fun spot seeing that ship from across the harbour in Stavanger. You can pick up exactly what ship this one is by that A530 on the stern, that’s the pennant number. Like …

Picture. It's night and we're looking at the side of a grey military ship. The front is to the left and a little back from there is a squared off block with the masts on top. Behind here is a long flat deck going perhaps three quarters of the length. We can see lights reflecting off the rippled sea water.

That’s the US Navy ship USS Oak Hill, you can just about pick out the pennant number on the front there. She’s LSD-51, a landing ship dock where landing craft (holding troops and tanks and trucks) go into an open area at the back of the ship. We have some of these as well, similar ships called the Bay Class LSDA (Landing Ship Dock Auxiliary). Oak Hill docked up a little bit of time after we did and was still there when we sailed away.

It was fun seeing the smaller ships around as well. In Norway, the ports would typically have a collection of offshore support vessels looking to supply the oil rigs. They weren’t in Spain and Portugal but we did see …

Picture. We're looking across a harbour towards a blue ship with a thick white band down the middle. She has a tall superstructure up front, with a low more open area aft with a single funnel and multiple cranes.

That’s the research ship Odon de Buen (name’s up front). Definitely wondering what that ship would be up to. I think she’s either running underwater vehicles on tethers for survey work or could have been doing seabed cable laying. Maybe she’s looking for oil to open up a new gold rush for Portugal or Spain.

Picture. We're looking at a navy war ship that's behind a train car with metal rails on it.

That’s the Portugese frigate F333 NRP Bartolomeu Dias, which started out life as HNLMS Van Nes in the Dutch Navy before being sold to Portugal. That’s about the best angle I could get there, although I could have maybe gone to the top of the nearby bridge … maybe next time :-D.

I think I need to hit the lifeboat in search of snacks soon, a couple more ?

Picture. we're looking down at a small boat around 15m long, speeding through the water with a wake from the front and the engines. The boat is black hulled, with a green deck. The wheelhouse is white with "Pilotos" in white text on dark blue. The roof is light red with masts on top. There is a man in dark trousers and red jacket on the back part of the deck.

Can’t forget the pilots. The big ships wouldn’t get into port without incident as regularly as they do without the Pilots and the Tugboats to help them in and out again without bumping into things.

Picture. We're looking out over a marina in the harbour. Up close, our little red dwagon on a wall. Behind in the water, there are several masted sailing ships moored up.

Time to grab an excuse to mention someone 🙂 I have a Curlylocksgamer stream on in the background for the desktop and am enjoying listening in to chill pirate vibes as she’s playing Sea Of Thieves. I’ve met Curly twice at the two Creator North meet ups, she’s fun, good to watch. Struggles with disability issues though, so it’s been wonderful to see her being able to have fun with us on the streams again lately. Lovely lady.

Picture. It's dark, we're looking across a port towards vehicles and containers and lorries on the dockside beside a moored ferry. The ferry is blue below the main deck and white above. The word Condor is on the side. We can see the city lights in the background.

That’s the smaller of the two ferries that was in Portsmouth when we got back home, the bigger one is off to the left of picture. The other one was a Brittany Ferries roll on roll off ship. And on the other side …

Picture. It's night time again and we're looking out over calm water at a couple of grey navy ships. The one in front is another with superstructure at the back and a low open area forwards. Behind we can just about see another grey ship. The calm water is reflecting the ships.

We could see into the Navy Yard over there … with Wave Knight (another older fleet tanker) in front of one of the Type 45 Destroyers (dunno which one) behind getting some work done. Always good to see the ships.

Time to hit post I think, it’s been fun doing the cruise posts a little bit differently to last year. I’ll talk about the ports at some point as well :-D.

Advent Day 6 Y Wing when you can ship ?

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December 6, 2024

9:20 pm

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Hello everyone,

What’s behind door number 6 ?

Picture. Our advent collection is growing, it's the snow scene again, with the red dwagon to the left. The Tie Fighter is in front of the dwagon and the XWing is centre right. The droid and Leia are at the back and the walker is heading off to the right. Centre front is a white with yellow highlights space fighter with two long engines flanking a pilots area.

Today’s little model is an Alliance Y Wing. It’s a fighter bomber ship, not too good at either role :-D. But still a mainstay of the fighter fleet. Am I doing better than yesterday ? Maybe a bit. I should be better after a quiet weekend hiding from the storm that’s going to come through tonight.

Is now a good time to talk about ships ? Let’s go.

Picture. We're looking into a ship cabin. In front is a wooden topped table with our little red dwagon sitting on top looking at us. Behind are a pair of single beds, light green below and white blankets on top. At the back is a square porthole looking ashore flanked by striped curtains.

Let’s start with the cabin, I had a single grade cabin although as you can see there it is made up with two single beds there. Cozy ! And excellently turned out by the lovely MT who was looking after my cabin. To the left was a desk top with UK and Euro plug sockets. I also had a kettle and mugs in there, a couple of chairs, plenty of cupboard space, a fridge, safe and a shower bathroom behind the shot there. Really good place to disappear in to for the almost fortnight. (Excuse the untidiness I’m adding in there with my coat)

Time for a wander …

Picture. It's dark out, with the side of the ship being defined by a guard rail to the left. To the right is a row of portholes and doors, with that being the inside of the ship. We're looking straight ahead down a well lit external deck, disappearing into the distance.

My cabin was on deck 2, quite low down. Heading up a deck we had the Promenade deck. Borealis is 231m long, with the outer part of the Promenade deck covering most of that length of the ship and allowing you to walk (or some were running it) all the way around, outside of a little area that goes up to the Foredeck. There were some unlit parts of the Promenade deck as well which were my go to place for looking at the stars.

Picture. We're looking out over an exposed front end of the ship. There is a guardrail showing the extent of where we could go, with a small mast at the pointy end up front. Above, we see a little bit of blue sky with lots of wispy white cloud.

There we are, I didn’t get the chance to go up to the Foredeck much, it wasn’t open much over the fortnight. (Bit exposed there) That’s from when we were departing from Ferrol on the Friday, I’ve been timeskipping a little bit over the pictures.

Picture. We're looking at a very ornate column with a statue on top. The column has three clocks arranged vertically. Behind is a staircase curling around. Lots of wood, very polished, very well lit.

Heading up a deck and 4 and 5 decks were the main decks. That big statue and clock there was from the main atrium pretty much at the centre of the ship. Up front, we had the Neptune Lounge which was a big theatre hall place where the shows would take place. Back aft was the main restaurant, split over two decks. In the middle, mainly on 5 deck, were boutiques, ship shop (very ship shape), bar lounge and a few cozy places like the Bookmark cafe which became a go to chill out for a while place.

Picture. We're looking down at a coffee table, which has a mug of hot chocolate to the right, a huge piece of swiss roll cake to the left and a hungry looking little red dwagon hungrily looking at the cake.

They had cake.

I didn’t spend too much time on 6 and 7 deck, as these were mostly more decks for cabins, with 7 deck being where the Bridge of the ship was. 6 Deck was called the Highland deck and had a little observation area up front, where I found myself sitting for a while a few times. Nice peaceful spot, although it was a bit exposed with the wind.

Have I got something of 8 deck ?

Picture. We're looking down from above into a swimming pool area. The pool is in the centre of the deck, with deck chairs surrounding it on three sides. The pool is lit up in light green, with blue purple spots illuminating a bar area to the left.

There we are. 8 Deck was the Lido deck, with the pool there in the middle. This was one of the casual restaurant and bar areas, with the buffet restaurant where I’d have breakfast and two other bars sharing this deck. The Lido deck had gorgeous fish and chips. We could look out the back of the ship here from The View bar …

Picture. Our little red dwagon has found the ideal spot to watch a sunset. They were perched on a sunbed, with the rail of the ship behind them. Behind that is the sea, with the orange looking sky dominated by the setting sun.

There were beautiful sunsets and wonderful views out to sea. 9 Deck was almost completely open, with a little bar area up front. My favourite way of going to and from the main dining room was to go outside up to 9 Deck and then walk aft and go down from there. (There was a crew only area that blocked off the direct route on 4 Deck).

Picture. We're outside the ship, looking towards the front bit. Ahead of us is a light colour wooden deck. Left is the guard rail. To the right is a white painted cover. Ahead of the ship, angry looking cloud about to cover the sun up above.

That’s another view from 9 Deck, this time with the Lido Deck roof closed up. This is from the first Wednesday with a taste of what was to come there with the cloud … We were headed in to that, it was a bit rough :-D.

So there we are ! That was a little tour through Borealis. She’s a 231m long 65,000 tonne ship. Beautifully turned out, with a superb crew who looked after us fantastically well and made this a wonderful place to be for the 11 days of the cruise.

Time to sign off now … Tashnarr is streaming again ! Need to pay attention :-). Have a lovely evening everyone.

Lighting up and a little ceremony

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November 17, 2023

11:47 am

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Hello everyone,

I’ve now seen the Northern Lights ! We’re also above the Arctic Circle now so it’s definitely a case of wrapping up warm when we venture outside. We were greeted by this fellow, after a rousing cheer to wake him up.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking upwards at a manic looking figure leaning over the white deck rail and gesturing upwards with an open right hand. He's wearing an orange tunic under a thick white woollen cloak. He is wearing a pointy white hat.
NJORD

That’s King Njord, who led the Arctic Circle crossing ceremony on Wednesday morning, where crew and guests were (optionally) baptised with a spoonful of codliver oil followed by a “drink” of water. And by “drink”, we mean a bucket down the back of the neck.

I’m sad to say that I kinda hid when the baptising was occurring, mostly because my back has been giving me the warning signs to tell me to look after it better in case the pain levels increase to where I’m going to have to restrict the movement even more. But it also let me disappear to the stern of the ship where …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking out across a sea with small waves. Above the horizon, we can see a scattered low level of darker thinner cloud with blue sky above. On the horizon, peeking out behind low hills is a very bright sun, with a reflecting glinting off the waves below to the left of the wake of the propellers of the ship.

Sun says hi. We’ve been treated to some lovely sunrises and sunsets as we go up and down the coast. It’s a fairly extended period too, so that picture was at 0935 and it was already pretty light outside at before 0900 when we passed this lighthouse.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking out over the sea towards a lighthouse on an island. The lighthouse is a tower painted in bands of red and white. The light at the top is shining towards us. There are a couple of small houses at the base.

That was from Wednesday morning and at time of writing, we’re headed past glacier covered hills on our way into Alta. But that’s for a later post as I catch up more. Alta is a northern town/city and we’ll be visiting their Northern Lights cathedral. I’ll have the old (yep, the one I’ve owned for 7 days) tripod with me and we’re hoping for clear skies so we can see more of …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at a dark night sky, with occasional dots of light from the stars. But the main thing here is a thin strip of green light, hazily starting to the centre left and going upwards to the right hand side.

That’s from my Canon Ixus 265 as I steadily figure out how to get the best out of it. I think I’ve learned a fair bit so far. One of the expedition team is the lovely Geraldine, expert photographer. While there isn’t much scope to do much with my little Canon camera, Geraldine’s tips to us all have pointed me towards the settings needed to start getting pictures like that on the little camera (high ISO, long exposure and the tripod is coming in handy too). And I’ll hopefully get more aurora pictures soon.

Geraldine’s excellent tips and advice also let me figure out what was going wrong on the more automatic settings … like a night setting with ISO 100. ISO is a sensitivity setting. Lower settings are less sensitive, so pointing the camera at an aurora at ISO 100 and long exposure time was just giving me a black screen. The picture above is ISO 1600 and I have another click to ISO 3200 to try. I have some decent pictures of one of the bridges that we passed under that may make it to a later post.

But one real start with the aurora is …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at Aurora Borealis again, with a much bigger green glow covering most of the upper part of shot. Down below, we see the rail in black, with three ghostly figures with red jackets visible.

Cor. Looks good doesn’t it. That’s from the Pixel 4 mobile phone camera in its night sight mode. It’s given me some spectacular looking views of Trollfjord. That’s on an automatic setting, on a tripod and I’m really impressed with how that one has turned out. Maybe a bit over exposed at ISO 5877 but I really like the picture, especially having the ghostly figures below.

I’ve really enjoyed seeing the lights and also learning how to get the best out of the tools to capture the memories of them.

If you’re curious about the equipment, the compact camera is a Canon Ixus 265 and I’m now doing the night shots in P for Program mode, which lets me open up the ISO settings. It’ll be sitting on a tripod for these shots and I bought the cheap £30 National Geographic tripod. It’s simple, does the job, although I have trapped fingers a couple of times with the smart phone attachment. (It’s a springloaded thing with sharper edges than need be). The mobile phone camera is a Pixel 4, running the automatic settings of Night Sight.

I might be steadily catching up with posts. Since King Njord gave us his blessing yesterday morning, we visited the pretty fishing town of Svolvaer, with a longer visit coming up to Alta today. Pictures later ! For now though, I’m wondering how they fit everything they need to into this boat …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking over a rippled sea towards a short ship. She's blue below upper decks painted white. In the small space are winches, a crane, the bridge with radar and communications above, a small orange boat and then the engine exhausts with more winches and crane at the back.

That’s not processed or squished at all … She really is that short and is packing a lot in there. She’s the fishing vessel Skolmen and is just 27.4m long. (Marinetraffic link)

The port there is Svolvaer, with drying racks for cod visible in the upper right. More about Svolvaer later. Sadly no souvenir because I forgot to bring my wallet with me … oops :-D. I’ve seen several Orca as well this morning but sadly wasn’t fast enough to bring the camera to bear.

It’s probably getting time for food though before a couple of activities prior to the ship coming into Alta. More on the weekend :-D. Have a lovely day everyone.

Is this thing dusty yet ?

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October 15, 2020

9:45 pm

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Probably 🙂

Oh ! Just spotted that WordPress allows captions on images. That’s new … never had that on Blogger. And there I go with the opening up a post and goi…. SQUIRREL !

To be honest though, I should probably have what amounts to the Cone of Shame from the same movie that made the Squirrel joke thing popular. Up was a remarkable film, one of the best to come out from Pixar. Going from heartwarming to heart breaking, all in the intro before the main body of the movie kicked off. I should watch it again some day.

Some of you may be coming here via a Work Thing that’s probably been published by now. HI THERE ! And welcome. I try to keep this as a place where I talk about what I’m thinking and things I’ve been doing. Like the internet spaceships :

USS Sylvia Tilly

There we go. New toy played with.

If I’ve been someplace, I’ll usually talk about that as well although I do notice that I didn’t put anything on the old blog about a trip around SS Great Britain that happened almost two years ago now. That was a good little walk around the ship and I’d thoroughly recommend people going for a look when things are less scary out there than they are now.

SS Great Britain

I’ll have to post the rest of those pictures some day. And then there’s the Lego and other building things I’ll do. I like how they steadily come together. Sometimes the designers of the model will hide little Easter Eggs away inside as well, which is something I like a lot.

The art is something that’ll appear when it’s done as well, although there are limits on what I can post here. Some of what I do is modifications made to other people’s work. Typically emotes … those will appear on their discord servers and I’ll send them on to other people I know as well. But it’s a Really Bad Thing to essentially copy someone else’s art and take it as your own. That’s one reason I’ve been looking to acquire an art style of my own, that way I own more of I post here. (I note that WordPress has added a (C) to the bottom of the page too !)

I try to keep this space relatively free of current events and what’s happening in the world. You’ll see far too much about what’s happening in other spaces and I find it a massive drag on the psyche … especially as you have to apply a heavy quality filter to everything you see because pretty much everything posted is bent one way or another. But yeah, there’s far too much of the bad stuff out there, I like to keep this space free of it unless there’s something I really have to get out of my mind and into typed in thoughts.

The blog template as a whole is something that still needs more work. The blogger version has a couple of lists of links and I want to bring that back too. It also has a blogroll where I can see if people have posted new stuff recently. That’s an excellent thing to have. But I’ll look to keep the white text on black basic format. Heavily contrasting colours aid readability and dark mode is easier on the eyes, it means you don’t have Big White Background blaring out at you. Black text on white paper works for books but I’m a convert to dark mode for screens.

I haven’t done anything really new lately with the art (outside of posing screenshots), it’s all been modifications. Spooky emotes are in and I’ve spookified three of them. One got adopted and is on the lovely Margaret Krohn’s discord (website link). I didn’t like the middle one and I don’t know whether the recipient of the third liked her one. But I was very happy that the animation conversion of another thing for Maggie K’s discord got adopted.

It’s one thing getting positive feedback, that’s always awesome especially to someone who lives on that like me. It’s a whole other thing having your art adopted for someone else’s posts or pages. That goes far beyond “I like your stuff”. People from work may vaguely recognise another one :

That was a fun little one that I did a little while ago. I’ve been finding that taking of pictures of what’s on the paper using a camera does odd things to the colour balance and it can turn the paper into grey, which the image disappears into.

That’s my current avatar, edited and updated to bring him out of the page some more. I left the grey down at the bottom to show him sitting on something. Oh and I still have the awkward feelings about how his knee is bending the wrong way :-D. The book needs tidying as well, I deleted too much when removing the grey.

That’s the kind of style I’m aiming for with my own drawings. I was a big fan of Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes as a kiddie. Those were very simply drawn cartoons that were absolute genius. If you look up close at a lot of drawn cartoons or animations, it’ll probably surprise you how simple they actually are. Simple works !

But simple also needs precision that I don’t have yet. The artists I like tend to have very precise lines and curves, which they then fill with colour. I’m sure the process behind the image is a bit more complex than that.

I’m a bit limited though by my body … I’m having a fair few upper body issues at the moment. My neck and shoulders are suffering in particular from stiffness that’s getting more and more uncomfortable. The shoulder issues extend down my arm into my right wrist as well. It was with a fair bit of relief at work when I was able to shift from doing written meeting notes and into things I’d type into a Word document or a draft email. Typing is way easier for me than writing or … drawing.

That said, the graphics tablet I have is great for doing those sketches. And I need to draw more of my dwagon alphabet and the dwagon rock band. Maybe next year’s April Fool will be setting up a rock band, although I did that already in 2015. Gosh, that’s longer ago than I thought.

And this post has gone on a bit longer than I thought it might too !

Physically – struggling. I need to greatly reduce how much of certain games I play. I haven’t been back to Final Fantasy XIV and may have to add Star Trek Online to that danger list as well. Elite has been on a bit of a break due to being disillusioned with the combat side of it.

Motorsport Manager has been a great one as it’s mostly hands off with occasional intervention for tactics. I may well see if I can lead 3 teams to success this time around, swapping from single seaters to GT cars and then into Endurance, with the switch happening when the team wins.

I haven’t written about music for a while either, that’s overdue ! I can happily report that my ears are back to normal again, which came as a bit of a surprise because I didn’t get that POP feeling from them. I suffer with tinnitus as a baseline (which is probably why I like multiple sound sources going on) but had a blocked ear for a few weeks too which was affecting me more than I’d like (headaches as well).

Wrap up time I think … for any new people, this is a fairly typical post where I’ll start out with one idea, go SQUIRREL, talk about something else for a bit and maybe, just maybe get back to the original theme.

I’ll hopefully see you next time !

PS There’s a few extra posts around in that archive too, I need to delete them ! The proper import tool didn’t work, so I had to use a messier alternate. Instead of a little over 1650 posts, it added in 2841 … I need to get deleting !

PS2 I just had a mental image of a Dwagon holding a big eraser too. So that may happen if my hands are up to it.