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 ?
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.
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.
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 !