vaccine - Sleepypete's Pillow

Hello everyone,

I’ve been jabbed ! Again ! Yesterday was my second shot. Last time, I had the bad muscles for a day or so and then Brain definitely wasn’t operating to usual standards for the rest of that week. I might have a repeat of that coming, we’ll see over the next few days, although bad brain today might partly be down to taking a hayfever tablet for the first time in I dunno how long. I have sensitivities to hayfever tablets … but figured it was better to brave those and give my watering eyes a chance to rest up.

Eyes ?

Picture. My red fluffy dwagon is sitting on a wooden nightstand. He has two pairs of apparently identical metal rimmed glasses propped up on him. Both have a small reflection of a window, the lower one is blue tinted. — Eye see an upgrade

So, 5g upgrade yesterday and second pair of glasses appeared on (gosh, think brain is starting to suffer!) Thursday and yes I did need to look that up. The top pair are normal glasses, the lower pair are reading glasses. One of the catalysts for changing eventually was that I was having a lot of trouble reading books with my old glasses, beyond what will become apparent in a picture I’ll show later. The reading glasses have a blue tint on them which, in theory if I use them more, should help with getting to sleep more as Brain thinks it’s night time instead of being confused by monitor light.

Would I go for the same choice again ? No, after the need for masks drops (needed to wear one during the eye exam and fogginess happened), I’ll get some variofocals so I can swap between book reading and watching stream chat.

It’s been a very welcome change … here are the old ones.

Picture. My red fluffy dwagon is in the background, with a black glasses cleaning cloth draped over him. My green pocket dragon with his arms held out like wings is sitting in front and I am holding my old glasses up in front of him. Semi opaque shapes are on part of both lenses. — Danger fingers

There we go. That’s the old pair. You can hopefully see the discolouration and semi-opaque patterning on both lenses near the bridge. These are delamination of the lenses which was steadily getting worse and worse each time the glasses were cleaned. I could still see properly with these but I had found myself looking around the bad patches. It’s good to be able to look straight ahead clearly again.

One thing I do still need to acquire is a pair of shades to attach. One reason I’d held off so long to replace my old glasses was that I wanted to get a pair of the magnet shades that are tailored to the frames. Those disappeared from the shops a long time ago … For those who don’t have to wear glasses much (and can therefore adopt non-prescription sunglasses !) there are three main choices.

Bridge clip ons – these have little arms that grip on to the lenses around the bridge. They take ages to put on and take off the glasses so these are definitely a Really Bad Option for when you’re on the road. (Flip up shades are an option)

Lens clip ons – these have little arms that go on the outside of the lenses and they’re held in place by a springy attachment between the lenses. These are a pretty good option and you can flip them on and off with one hand.

Magnetic clip ons – these have magnets in the frames and shades which are fantastic for pulling on and off with one hand.

I.e. one hand is on the wheel, the other hand is quickly taking the shades on and off. Vision is uninterrupted. Bridge clip ons would mean a certain amount of time when You Cannot See The Road. This is bad.

So yep, one more upgrade to get. Maybe the shades will act as a good antenna for the 5g. And I’m mixing my words up which could bode well for next week at work.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My mining ship is in the foreground. She is roughly diamond shaped, squared off at the back with a pair of engines. The ship is mostly red with gold highlights and we see the top pointing to the right. In the background is a blue giant planet. The top right half of the image (diagonal split) is a white ring with clusters of dark brown rocks. The white ring is shading the obscured part of the gas giant. — Manic Minarr about to get to work

Elite spaceshipping happened last week, with a couple of mining sessions so far in Manic Minarr. They’ve put out a couple of hotfixes so far which improved the performance a bit but it is still way below what I would want for the trickier docking manoeuvre times. I was cheerfully falling in love with the graphics again but the performance of the game and the attitude of the company (as mentioned in last post) leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s as if they, on seeing that their customer relations hit rock bottom, decided to start digging. My blood was boiling this morning when I found out that the Issue that I’d contributed to complaining that I (and many others) couldn’t download the soundtrack had been closed as “Fixed”. It ain’t fixed, we still get the same error and so another cluster of issues have been raised which are getting more names behind them.

Advice – don’t buy any products from Frontier Developments. This includes Elite as well as the Park games (Jurassic Work Evolution, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster). There have been a number of shady companies involved in the gaming market and Frontier seem to be competing heavily for that crown at the moment. (They need to go a long way to beat the Star Citizen company)

That said, game is pretty. I just think people like Egosoft who make the X games have massively missed a trick by not seeing the Odyssey launch disaster and continuing the discount of the week before. I think I might have skipped internet spaceship games …

Gosh. What else has been going on … XCom 2 campaign finished ! More screenshots at a later date. Maybe. I’ve been playing the Legacy Hub stuff that got added to cover the time between the XCom 1 and XCom 2 games. Oh ! What’s XCom ? It’s an alien invasion game where the aliens have arrived and are attempting to subvert the world’s governments into submitting to them. XCom 1 is set in contemporary times, with you commanding a hidden mountain base. The stakes steadily rise in step with the research into better weaponry for your small squads of soldiers. It either ends with you storming their temple ship and beating them back, or the aliens subverting enough governments to cause XCom to get abandoned.

And so XCom 2 opens up with you as the Commander being rescued from alien captivity. 20 odd years have passed since the first game and in this version, humanity lost badly. The aliens are in total control, as Advent, and they are going forward with something sinister called the Avatar Project. Of course you have to stop them, operating out of a captured alien UFO that becomes your mobile base.

They are legendary games and a fantastic update to the first series of XCom games from the 90s. The movement and actions system got changed from Time Units controlling everything into characters being allowed 2 actions, either a double move or a move and fire. They’re the benchmark games of this type. I wonder if there will be an XCom 3 ?

Hope so. They’re great games and Firaxis make good stuff, including having their games open totally to modding although that’s been marred a little lately by the publisher putting an unnecessary loader in that has adverts and breaks a lot of the mods.

I appear to be a little sparky about some things in today’s post …

More games have arrived ! There was a little steam sale last week which led to the 2 Divinity Original Sin role playing games arriving. Now that XCom 2 is complete, it’ll let me uninstall that and free up space for Divinity. Or I could just install the big hard disc that’s been waiting for a long time. Perhaps next weekend when the cricket is on and Nurburgring isn’t …

That was a bit of a disappointment this year. The 24 hour race ended up being about 6 hours at the start before fog set in and stopped the racing and then it resumed for about a 4 hour sprint this morning. Still good to watch, would be better if the climate around those mountains allowed for the full 24 hours. They have to keep it safe though, so stopping for the fog is a mixed feelings contrast. On one hand, wanna see more racing ! On the other, I remember a couple of years ago where I stopped watching and went to bed because I could see an even more horrendous crash than had happened already coming …

Still, it’s good that they could hold it despite our current pandemic conditions.

I better post and leg it, Tashnarr’s on and I need to rest my brain before it melts more.

Stay safe everyone, be well !

Hello everyone,

Last week’s been a bit weird, at least since Saturday. I got jabbed …

Picture. A green Pocket Dragon looks at you expectantly. He is wearing a disc like torch above his right eye and he's carrying an implement that looks like a stethoscope. — Doctor will see you now

Yep. Jab on Saturday. I was pleasantly surprised to get the call actually, I’m a little below the 50 year old threshold got called last week but whatever the reason, I’m glad I had it.

I think I have had side effects from it but that’s something I’ll happily accommodate if it means opening everything up again. Besides, that’s a sign that the vaccine is doing its job in getting your body’s defences ready to fight a pretty nasty virus. I’ve mostly been in a bad brain condition for the few days since, although today has been better. My muscles were complaining over the weekend as well.

If you’re hesitant about the vaccine due to a fear of needles, don’t be. I barely felt a prick as they did mine and couldn’t see the evidence of the hole it made. I’m a bit nervous about needles. I make a point of looking away, so that I don’t tense up as I see the needle going in. Being relaxed makes the job easier for the stabby person and that makes it easier on you too.

It’s been a weird year hasn’t it … I’ve barely seen anyone I know all year. I’ve seen my mum once. I’ve seen barely any of the friend people, just in random encounters in Tesco. I’ve spotted my neighbour Cyberkitten a few times. Chinese happened a couple of times. It’s good to see the lady who slips bonus prawn crackers into the bag. Pizzas have kept coming … Shopping trips were cut down to a bare minimum.

I’ve seen work people on two occasions since this time last year when we were at an away trial. Our place went work from home very early and stayed that way even over last summer.

Hmm. Must think of something to write up for April 1st. I’m short on ideas at the moment.

But yeah … this last year has been very different. Perhaps it’s indulged a reclusiveness tendency ? Yeah, I’ll need to break that.

Cartoon Picture. A cute lady is standing on her own in the middle of groups, one of which has a party hat. Caption "I could be home on the internet right now"

The internet communities have probably gotten a lot stronger over the last year, outside of a certain amount of craziness last summer when we didn’t really know what was going on. Some of the internet communities are better than others, I’ve walked away from one and I’ll walk away from another soon. Gotta look at your own mental health and if a community is bad for that, find a different one.

Oh ! This blog happened as well, in a crazy few days in October. I need to do more work on it to be honest. Things like carrying over the blogroll and the useful links from the old blog. There are a few other things too :

Alt-text – first up because I think this is really, really important ! I’ll get back to accessibility later but this one is for people who depend on screen readers. The alt-text for images is my attempt at describing them for people who can’t see them. I would have liked to go back through all the posts when I got time but it ain’t gonna work for the 1700 or so posts that were imported over from the old blog.

Dark mode / light mode – accessibility again. It’s really important that when you make a site, it’s accessible by everyone. Some people get blinded by dark text on white background. (I don’t like that on screens, it works for me in books though). I like white text on a dark background with screens. It’s kinder on my eyes.

And a few other points that are escaping my still a little addled brain at the moment.

Accessibility is absolutely key though. I’ve clicked on a few links and then immediately closed the site due to things like paywall blocking, cookie popups and other things that force you do to stuff you don’t want to agree to. Or it could be because you simply cannot read what’s on the screen.

That’s ok. If you’re affected by accessibility issues, then it’s the responsibility of the person making the site to make sure we accommodate you. We want you to stay and read, if you can’t then we lose you as a reader. Every reader is important, whatever the scale of the site.

I think I’m rambling … Screenshot time ?

Game screenshot. Final Fantasy 14. My character is in front, wearing metal plate armour like medieval knights would wear. It has silver patterning on a green surcoat. The helmet is metal, with the point at the front. A lady in a more revealing outfit stands to her left. This is an indoor scene. — Pointy Hat ! Errr, wait ?

Got a new hat ! And shiny armour that, contrary to fantasy game norms, actually looks protective …

I’ve been having another look at the Pathfinder Kingmaker game as well. More on that at another time, I’m barely through the prologue on that one but it is great to see that it’s grown a turn based mode. That’s a weird thing. Table top role playing games started with pen and paper systems, where everyone, player and monster, took turns to act. When Baldur’s Gate came around in the 90s, everything still took its turn but it was presented to the player as a simultaneous action thing. My brain never really got on with that. It’s funny to see things turn full circle again now, with Pathfinder growing its turn based mode and Baldur’s Gate 3 also going turn based.

It makes for more relaxing gameplay, especially when there’s a lot going on in the encounters. Like 15 characters and enemies in the encounter that Fuzzy is playing through at the moment on stream. (Twitch link)

As a weird aside, I find myself craving tomato ketchup. I haven’t had tomato ketchup in years. Wonder what reminded me of it ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see the darkened shape of the port upper side of the spaceship, lit dimly by the glowing heatsinks at the back. Behind is the white cloud of the galaxy ribbon, lensed by a black hole in the left hand side of the image. — Thanduc’s Retreat

I’ve visited another black hole since the last post … Managed to get a great angle too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. My ship is looking rather battered in the lower centre foreground. Behind is a very large space station type ship called a fleet carrier. There is a control tower in the middle and landing pads behind. The galactic ribbon can be seen above. — Where’s the bar ?

I wanted to see what that paint job really looks like though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A close up of my ship on the landing pad. The paint is perfect again, with segments of orange, grey, white and a washed out yellow. We see the port upper side. The name "Searching for Dragons" is now readable, as is the callsign "K080LD" or Kobold to the rear. — All shinied up again

Looks rather smart doesn’t it ? Happy with this one.

I better sum up here, it won’t be a week until the next post. Car’s coming on Friday and I’ll be going someplace to a) pick it up and b) get pictures. The fact that the place to get pictures will also have a farm shop is purely coincidental … honest.

Picture. Meme. A small dog is wearing a mask, looking up at someone off screen. The captions are "I can assure you, madame" and "Dogs are perfectly capable of performing a cat scan." — Believe in Dog

Stay safe everyone, be well and if you are offered a vaccination soon, please do take it. The side effects are worth the pay off we’ll all get later when shops, cinemas, restaurants and the rest are able to open up again and we’re able to go Out There again with no fear of plague.

Tag: vaccine

Upgrades

A year of lockdown, also jabby