New Year New Ships New Saga ?

Hello everyone,

Happy new year everyone. I hope it's a good one for you all.

I've started the year with a bit of a saga ... I currently have 2x Google Pixel 4 phones. Oops. But first ... thumbnail !

What could it be ? More later. There will also be Internet Spaceships and other spaceships.

Phone saga - I attempted to upgrade to a Pixel 4 last week but ... did it through the new phone bit instead of upgrade bit, so there would have been issues keeping my old number. I've had that number for maybe 25 years now ! (Depends whether I had phone before uni or after) Don't wanna lose that. Long story short - the new one is cancelled, upgrade has been delivered, all my 2 factor authentication people will be very confused by now (as is the bus ticket people !) and I need to smuggle the new one back to Three again. Apparently the shops can't take returns from online, which feels a bit daft. It seems like the shops would be the perfect place to transfer custody and check that all the bits are in there.

Internet spaceships has seen a new arrival :

That's the Searching for Potatoes, a name inspired by the lovely Kolo and that ship will go around the galaxy over the next few months. Should be good. There were some shenanigans with the old ship first though ...

Including some planetary base exploration ...

Shenanigans in the rover ...

Oops.

That ship looked like it came down pretty hard.

And ... new games may have appeared :

It's called EarthX and it's about managing a rocket launching company. Looked promising, although it's an early access game (by a 17 year old on their own - awesome job already) so it's not done yet. The initial peek was fun.

Back to work tomorrow. The holiday period has been pretty dominated by what feels like a mix of nasty cough and benign cough. The cough itself wouldn't be too bad ... except there's been a few incidents where it has felt like I've had a brain shut down and reset due to coughing too much. Not good, hopefully all gone !

But ... about that boat ?

That's what's in the box. I'm trying something new here ... the new phone automatically uploads pictures to my google account so instead of copying them over via Bluetooth, new technique time. Hope it works out.

Every ship (well - most of them !) starts with a keel laying and my first exposure to elastic bands on this project. There may have been some sorcery with knots required but on the whole, the kit went together pretty smartly with the knobbly bits fitting in to the holes snugly. It won't be coming apart in a hurry and minimal sanding was needed to encourage things to fit. (Disclosure note - I bought the kit, watch for post and packaging costs - 1 place is cheap, 1 place is super pricey on P+P).

A side panel appears.

And the mechanisms start to take place. There is a driving wheel and a pair of wheels that give the boat a wobbly motion. And a wind up thingy !

And the starboard side goes on the boat. Including pendulum ... Oh as always, click for bigger and more detail with these.

Decking appears at the stern. Wonder what that is right near the stern ? More later.

The bow of the ship with the forward hull in place.

A view from a more assembled starboard side.

And much more assembled now. There's a fair bit of mechanism inside there. This is actually as complete as I'll take the model !

A view of the bow.

And port side. There's a lovely finish on the model. It isn't varnished (would probably interfere with the flat pack and assembly!) but the wood is lovely and gives off a nice woody smell.

Last one from above.

The mechanism is pretty tight so it isn't doing its elastic band powered forward movement thing but I think that's misalignments from me during build and a need of some of the waxing to lubricate the joins.

Would definitely get another of these :-D.

Sleeping for a week ...

... Arising to write a few words.

That's a wonderful sleeping dragon isn't it ? (Picture credit - Sticky Beak Boutique and here's the link to the Amazon page that Google pointed me at)

Ok, so I haven't been asleep since Friday but I have been enjoying my week off work so far. And it's just a rumour that I've been indulging in a 5 day Stellaris bender ... Maybe.

There's been lots of music listened to now. Even with a Portishead album, Evanescence's Synthesis and a Sophie Ellis Bextor orchestral album appearing, I've listened to everything in the library now ! Need more new music. Got a few things in mind but music has gone overpriced and I like my bargains.

It hasn't been all Stellaris. There's been a little bit of the internet spaceships too :

That's the Strength of Atlas on approach to one of the planetary bases. I do like the amount of detail that is added to these bases.

I'm pretty sure it's all programmed in as part of a toolkit approach where the designers have a box of bits that when stuck together, comprise all of the bases ... but it looks fresh whenever you visit a new place. And especially the planetary bases.

And there's a toolkit for the space stations too. In this one, you dock inside the ball and the rest of for your imagination. I think this one had a habitation ring aft, up above the top of the picture, wider than the docking bay ball. If you landed on one of these and only spin gravity were available, you'd be in low gravity in the docking bay which would handily suit docking operations and make cargo handling much easier. Same mass, less apparent weight. And then you'd be in zero g in the spine, transiting up to the higher gravity habitation ring.

I found this as well, an unexpected interchange zone in the middle of the station. Never seen one of those before. It's lovely to see all that unexpected detail.

But anyway - Stellaris ... the latest game in the hunt for the achievements saw me going for the Authoritarian run, where you need 500 population units with at least 200 as slaves. Done that ... although I've gone away from the slavery approach now and emancipated everyone because there were serious problems keeping everyone happy.

There must be a morality thing in there somewhere. Which I'll completely ignore when I close out the game fully because there's another achievement "Keep at least 5 different species as livestock in your empire." On one hand, emancipation of the slaves. The other hand is fetching the dinner plate. I sense it'll be easier to get that achievement in this playthrough instead of the more obvious approach of bringing out the Nomnivorian Swarm (devouring horde) again. The Swarm hungers ... and eats quickly.

I've had deliveries this week too ! Today actually. I don't like to order stuff online unless I can be around for when the delivery happens. So Meltdown's components got acquired when I was last on leave and today, these turn up :

Portable bluray drive - I didn't transfer over the bluray drive from my previous desktop because I thought it was bust. And ... proven correct. There were some jitters and issues when I first fired it up (sound plays but screen goes black) but those mostly went away with a reinstall of the software. Still not perfect though, there were still skips happening. Must test more.

But I did manage to watch and enjoy Rogue One again. It's a cracking movie. I may well work my way through Eps 4 to 8 again before Rise of Skywalker comes out. I'm expecting that one to be absolute junk for story, as per eps 7 and 8 but I think it'll be another stunning spectacle of a movie.

Why do I say that ?

There was an Expanded Universe of books and games that built upon the original trilogy of Star Wars. The X Wing game in particular was a prequel to the first movie, A New Hope, with the Tie Fighter game picking up afterwards. I came to X Wing late and struggled with it (a different era of games which went to insane difficult to gate your progress) but I hugely enjoyed Tie Fighter.

There were many important and incredible books too. I'm thinking of the Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston X Wing books and the Timothy Zahn books in particular. They expanded upon the worlds and galaxy introduced with the movies and added rich storytelling. I also enjoyed the Knights of the Old Republic (aka KOTOR) game, set 4,000 years before the movies and should really finish Kotor 2 at some point.

Anyway, all that rich story material was swept aside with the new movies which were stunning spectacles ... but really bad for whether or not they make any sense. Star Wars doesn't really make sense anyway but you'd like them to make a bit of an effort for it to.

That said, they make for an incredibly good spectacle and I really enjoyed watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

And then there's Rogue One, which was a stunning movie. I suspect Rise of Skywalker will be a stunning conclusion to this epic series. Although .... George Lucas way back said there were going to be 14 episodes in the series. Hmm. At least I think he did.

What else appeared ?

Advent calendar is sorted :-D. I don't think the other packets will last until then somehow ...

PS Ever since I had my attention drawn to it, I can't not see the difference that makes the Star Destroyer in the picture above an old one ... On the tower between the two shield domes there is an additional bit of detail there. That makes it an Imperial class Mk1 Star Destroyer. The bit between the domes is different on the Mk2 Imperial Star Destroyer. And ... the latest trailer for Rise of Skywalker apparently is showing the older ships. Curious. Perhaps it's reuse of ancient models ? Probably a JJ Abrams special. But there might be something more to it.

Back to work ?

Yep.

Back in tomorrow after a very restful week.

I didn't actually end up doing much, although I did escape the house (ha, I knew someone would ask that !). Needed supplies. Probably needed less supplies because I need to lose weight ... The snacking isn't being balanced by running around a cricket field any more so it's just ... accumulating. I'm not a fan of that. Especially as it means I'm having to search hard to find shirts for normal people, most of what I see available is an abomination known as Slim Fit.

Nah. This week was intended to be a recharging of batteries by not doing much and listening to lots of music. Oh and game playing too. Plus reading. I must write that post about The Martian before it all slips out of my head ...

What have I been up to ?

Stellaris ate the first weekend. I may have to look into game addiction again because Stellaris has steered me towards a phase where I'll open a game of that style in the morning/afternoon and still be playing it way after I should have at least broken for dinner. That's not healthy and it'll be a miracle if my sleep pattern resets to what it should be for catching the bus tomorrow. I think it'll be ok.

I almost stayed up for the 6 hours of Fuji race last weekend which started at 3am our time. I managed until 6am before deciding I needed to actually sleep ... It was a good race, as was the Formula 1 from this evening. Mind you, not much overtaking was actually happening again at the front. Some of the new circuits tend to cancel out the potential to overtake, although that's also down to the aerodynamics of the cars which suffer when they get close to the car in front.

Been playing lots of Motorsport Manager too ... I think it has a bug. It's been setting the AI of the car drivers down to very easy, when I actually want it neutral. It's been crashing a few times as well, which is annoying. My team survived their first season in the middle league, doing well in a couple of races to give them the points to not be last (the bottom team gets relegated and you waste a year). They'll challenge for promotion next season.

I quite enjoy that game, I know the Metagame technique to build the team up to beat everyone else but it rewards good strategy decisions in the races.

I had a little dabble in Planetbase yesterday too. Enjoyed that ... Here is the Clear Skies base about halfway to the 300 people goal :

The name comes from the planet type, which in this case was a Barren airless moon. The challenges on this one include no wind, so no wind power. The base gets bombarded by meteors and there are occasional solar flares which quite quickly irradiate colonists who get caught outdoors. This was the 3rd attempt yesterday, after the first couple died quickly to unfortunate solar flares (the exposed colonists die quickly if not treated).

Yep. Enjoyed that one. Tried Skyrim again today ...

The main reason I've been avoiding the more first person action type of game is because I've been having a lot of pain in my shoulder area and my right wrist .... and Skyrim brought that pain back. I'll give it a bit more time and see if that pain happens again.

Reading ? I completed The Martian again ... next one I'm reading is actually fanfic of the Stargate variety ... It's about what happened if Britain found and used the Stargate instead of allowing it to get shipped off to the USA. It's a curious read ... but more of that in a future post again. I have a few other books lined up in the queue :

Wraith Squadron book 3
The Expanse book 7 (Persepolis Rising) now that it's down in price from the rip off £10 for an electronic copy.
Need to watch The Expanse season 3 as well, which I believe finishes book 2 and then does book 3.
2x Jack Campbell Lost Fleet books - Steadfast and Leviathan. I started Steadfast a long time ago but stopped for one reason and another (think this was when I was so ill, I stopped reading because I didn't want to damage the books).
Children of Time has been recommended.
(Plus there are another bunch of books on the wish list)

XCom 2 is on the list to be replayed as well, it has had a mini expansion to fill in the gap between XCom 1 and the sequel. In the first game, you're fighting off the alien invaders from a secret location. In XCom 2, it turns out that you lost really badly and Earth is now in the hands of the aliens. You lead the resistance. The new mini expansion fills the gaps between the two games.

Perhaps when I've finished watching the Aavak playthrough of XCom 2. I try and avoid playing games that I'm also watching (so no buying Rimworld for a while) because that gets really confusing.

Music ? Tonnes of music has been listened to. Of 16.5k tracks in the library, I've listened to 5790 since getting the laptop a couple of months ago. I've listened to 1387 since going on leave.

Lots of music.

I haven't gone into the old pattern yet of Album -> good tunes -> semi random stuff yet ... The choices are pretty much all down to iTunes so far and I've been enjoying listening to everything with a fresh pair of ears again. I'll be curious to see what gets picked more often, at the moment it's a track from a game called AI War, which is another game I kinda collected, looked at and barely played.

Oops.

I have a few too many of those. I'm attempting to rein in that tendency somewhat now by asking myself it I'll really play it rather than just look at it in the library.

Time to get back to that Stargate fanfic now ! While an episode of Stargate Horizons plays on the Roll4it channel.

See you later in the week !

Busy sleeping

Holidays for me at the moment !

Holidays usually mean indulging in the pizza so I can enjoy it while getting away with the cheese = acid effects it usually gives me. I haven't actually gone for the pizza yet ! I must rectify this at some point.

I haven't gone too far yet. Although I was pondering a wander into Bristol to check out attractions like SS Great Britain. I want to see that at some point. Also the Planetarium, want to see that as well. Sometime. Soon. Maybe.

This week is more about rest and recuperation though. I was feeling the burn out creeping up behind me and tapping me on the shoulder. Plus I was getting increasing pain from my neck and both shoulders. (The right shoulder is a known injury ... but it's rarer for the left shoulder to join in too)

Time to take a break to recharge before Xmas kicks off.

Yep. I brought out the C word :-D.

What have I been up to ?

Definitely enjoyed the Nomnivorian Swarm and their fleet of Star Destroyers. That's in Stellaris, which has a nasty habit of making a day totally disappear once you open the game.

Talking of beings that eat everything in sight, especially their enemies, I should put the dinner on. Oops. Eating late again.

Watching the endurance racing cars on Sunday was good again, wonder if Toyota will keep their win this time. That's a bit sad, they've been disqualified from the last couple of races for breaking the rules. Which is really bad because they have a massive performance advantage over the other LMP1 cars.

Cricket has been good to watch as well, with a few wins for England despite the rain over in Sri Lanka.

I read the Martian again, more on that to come in a later post. This is the first time I watched the movie and then read the book. If you enjoyed the movie, definitely read the book. There is so much more in the book that was chopped out of the film. But that's stealing from the Book post.

The current read is essentially fanfic ... A Roll4it series just started with them playing in the Stargate universe, which has me wanting to watch the Stargate series (all 3 of them !) again. The fanfic is "What happened if Britain kept the Stargate and found out how to use it in the 1930s ?" More on that in a later post too. I'll be picking up Book 7 in the Expanse series too, now that it has reduced in price from the £10 they were asking until recently.

Motorsport Manager is still a game I'll keep going back to. It has a very hands off, strategic gameplay style that is very nicely fitting with me wanting to let the shoulders and wrists recover. The decisions you make definitely matter during the game. Ok, maybe not all of the decisions :

Glorious isn't it. Nope, the livery doesn't affect car performance. There is sadly no secret +1 to all performance if you paint the car red.

I have ventured out of the house, honest ! (Needed supplies ...)

Lego is tempting.

Hmm.

FOOD ! Back again soon !

PS There's also been lots of music listening to happening. iTunes tells me I've listened to 846 different tracks so far since Friday ... May get the chance of Repeat Track Since Laptop Bought Randomly Chosen down to 1 in 3 very soon.

Adventures in Windsor

Thursday saw me heading East. I'd accumulated almost 3 days worth of flexi working credit, so it was time to burn some of that down a bit.

I had an ideal location picked out.

Hello Legoland. I'm going to keep the pictures smaller because there are rather a lot of them (Facebook got 126. Yep. 3 figures worth. Not gonna post 'em all here !), as always .... click for bigger. All of these are taken with my proper camera so there are lots of pixels to see.

Lots of bricks too. The first main ride type area you get to on site is Star Wars and these two are outside. Inside, there are incredible dioramas depicting scenes from the first 6 movies.

They look amazing. And in fact a couple of messages sent to people quite early were along those lines. I was pretty blown away by the dioramas. The site is chock full of them. Some, you might not notice so much.

Check out the fella on top looking to nab your snacks.

Some are a lot more impressive. This fella is highly likely to become an avatar at some point.

And pirates. Quite a few pirates as well. And a Mariachi band. The lunchtime show involved pirates too. Most of the site is targeted at 6 to 12 year old kiddies and their parents but this lunchtime show was fun to watch for me too. Perhaps I am that 6 to 12 year old kiddie in a somewhat older body.

Hell, you should indulge yourself in some harmless fun if you can get away with it. Good for the soul.

Although don't swim. Swimmers might get eaten. Those dragons looked peckish.

Especially that one. Burger Dragon will definitely be an avatar at some point. Lego creations like this were all over the site. Most of the place was theme park, which didn't impress me too much. Too much roller coaster, not enough brick. Saying that though, I didn't actually partake in the roller coaster thing, maybe next time.

Humour too. As I walked past these fellas (and there were more of them), Queen's We Will Rock You was playing.

The really massive treat for me on the site though was Miniland. This had intricate statues inspired by places from all around the globe. USA, Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Russia, China, India and quite probably a few more too. Need to go back to refresh the memory.

We have lift off ? Yep. That is a giant Lego Space Shuttle and launch gantry. There's a crawler transport vehicle too and models representing the rest of Kennedy Space Centre. Definitely fanboyed over that.

Had great weather too, check out that sunshine.

Enough sun for crisp, clear shadows. Erm ... Totally didn't intend for my own shadow to be in shot ! Wear hats if the sun is as powerful as this folks.

The amount of detail was amazing, as was the number of different landmarks. Quite a few from London and beyond.

Wonder if they move the stones when the clocks change ? Couple more before I close ?

If you haven't watched The Mole sketch by Jasper Carrott, you've heavily missed out.

I loved this scene hidden outside the Atlantis aquarium area. That's definitely better visited than on camera (the low light wasn't so good for camera).

Just one more ! Star Wars again, this ... was larger than me.

Here's a video of them building it and ... those are small Lego star fighters dotted around the outside.

Great day. Had fun, enjoyed the visit, when can I go again ?

Book 18 - Babylon's Ashes ... and a holiday

Feels weird to be going back to work tomorrow !

Also hot. It feels a bit too warm at the moment.

Book first. I'm up to Book 6 in the Expanse series. I'll slow down now though because 2 books haven't been written yet and the 7th is still more expensive than I want to pay. (Handy tip - don't rush to spend cash if you don't have to).

I'm always a bit wary about doing the book reviews because of the spoiler potential. Nobody wants the spoilers. That reminds me ! Must check what someone thought of the Solo movie. I was underwhelmed, although that could have been due to being in the low side of my particular mental cycle. It felt like a movie that was out to tick as many lore boxes as it felt it had to, without any particularly good inspiration of its own. Rogue One was a far better movie for me, I must watch it again soon.

Anyway ! The Expanse.

Book 6 moves on the story with more in the tale of the Free Navy. It feels like these books are going to be in a series of 3 acts, with each act being 3 books. This book and the previous one massively redraw the map of the Expanse universe and this one wraps up a few threads from before ... including a death of a major character. That's one thing about the Expanse novels, you never really can tell if people are going to be safe although I get the feeling that the core 4 characters will survive all the way through to the 9th book which may owe a lot to the series origins as a role playing game.

I felt that Book 6 was a better book than number 5, which had a particular job to do ... and I'll be looking forward to when book 7 goes a little cheaper.

I need to figure out which book is next actually ... as I suspect that I'll finish my current book tonight if I get to the reading of it. More on that another day.

Holiday stuff :

Should have done some work around the house - didn't. (This is probably what generates the low mood - guilt).
Healing up - to an extent, although I really need to leave my legs alone so they have a chance to heal.
Games - Battletech is still awesome and ... I have reactivated Warcraft.
Addiction - Warcraft is very addictive. I'm almost at level 110 already and somehow managed to find a Legendary item. That's two for my characters !
Video watching - I've caught up on the youtube watching ... Well, at least as far as I take it. I avoid watching multiple series of the same game at the same time. It gets confusing.

And general me - I feel a bit more rested, although heat tends to beat rested feelings out of me quite quickly.

Anyway - Expanse Book 6. A worthy continuation of a very good series of books so far. It evolves its situation and its world but doesn't break it like some series of novels I know.

Recommended !

Back on the horse

At least,

Will be tomorrow. For now though, it feels a bit :

As far as yesterday's post goes, yep, that was my now traditional April Fools post. One year, there's going to be a totally unbelievable but actually true post. Bit like the novel writing post but one that might actually come true and happen.

Yesterday's post was a good one to write. There were only two things in there that weren't true ... There has, sadly, been no job offer from Paradox although I think it would be a very tough choice if there was one. I'm quite entrenched here with great people around me plus when I move posts in the next few months, it should be into one that is actually quite close to that creative engineer thing. Except not so much on the creative new ideas, more on delivering something special instead of indulging the imagination.

However it was a good excuse to write nice things about the Paradox people and the old Warcraft guild people. The Community Manager Susie who I keep mentioning is a special one, she actually engages with the community around the game. Which is Route One for making the community happy and engaged with the product they're pushing. I don't think I'd have pre-ordered Surviving Mars if not for the Susie and Niki streams and I'd have had a warier eye on Battletech ... which I'll probably preorder as well.

Depends on what the prerelease gameplay streams are like. The Surviving Mars ones showed off a well sorted game.

The question is though, why was it not Frontier with what I've written about Elite ? After all, Frontier is not too far away (they're based in the UK). I was actually back in playing Elite yesterday ...

It comes down to that community management thing, plus a lot of what the development group do with the game. It's a very pretty game and gets better looking with each update but .... it's very empty. And the community managers don't engage with their community. (The various links I've sent over to them didn't even get clicks plus I've heard very bad things about their engagement in general - if you're in the circle, you're ok. If you're out of the circle, you don't exist).

And I always do like saying nice things about people who have earned it and deserve it.

I have longer arms than that. Honest.

What else has been going on over the break ? Happily not too much. The break was intended to regenerate me out of burn out and hopefully that has succeeded. There's been :

Lots of music listening (1305 unique tracks according to iTunes);
Huge amounts of video watching;
A certain amount of cricket watching;
Far too much time in game (I'll count that up in a bit);

Resisting buying laptop or lego;
And a couple of films.

Was Tomb Raider on the Friday I went on leave ? Nah. I left work too late and ended up going to the shops while hungry. Don't do that folks. Although that did lead to me acquiring enough supplies to see me through the break.

The mob watched Pacific Rim 2 yesterday. The verdict ? They somehow managed to take the uplifting, fun, epic action of the first Pacific Rim and make it meh. A sequel that made some mad sense in itself but .... really wasn't necessary. John Boyega seems to have been taken to Hollywood's Heart as the next big thing, a flagbearer for inclusion but .... this movie isn't very good and he's playing the character from Attack the Block instead of the son of Pentecost.

There was a bit of reading too, although I'm still somewhat struggling through Revelation Space.

Back to work tomorrow though. It should be a quiet week, although I'm curious as to what was going on last week while I was away.

I better close up, the SpaceX stream just started ! Rokkits soon.

PS The gaming time over the last 2 weeks according to Steam :
9.4 hours of Stellaris - I have a new warrior monk xenophobe race that is already far ahead of the 2 neighbours. Just gotta get the influence to go to war and beat them up.
21.2 hours of Motorsport Manager - my team is now beating all comers so I'm looking to farm achievements. 1.5 seasons to go.
12.2 hours of Skyrim - and the start of a new adventure ...
176.3 hours of Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms - yep. You read that right. (I've been leaving it running when I go to bed and the champions earn lots of money to make the game easier for the next run). It's a daft addiction but one that I can have going while doing other things plus the game systems don't take much effort to learn.
(Which is why hours of Surviving Mars is jut 0.3 !)