Toasty Melty

Bit warm over here in GB at the moment.

Could be the perfect opportunity to do that at the moment, although I suspect the opportunity to run away would be particularly short.

How hot ? Not so hot compared to other parts of the world but we get hit hard by it over here because we just don't expect it. Our bodies aren't built for it and our homes are designed more to keep winter warm in instead of remove excess heat in the summer.

Anyway, the car was reporting 30 degrees C in the shaded car park over at the Mall on Monday and high 20s yesterday (can't remember how much !). I do remember that the steering wheel was scorching because I'd made a partial misjudgment of parking with the windscreen facing where the sun would be when I got back to the car. Shade was a bit lacking.

One thing I don't understand is that people see car steering wheel warmers as being highly desirable. I'm the opposite ... I've been enjoying the seat coolers and their ability to rapidly take the scorchy bum feeling away. I'd kinda like something similar for the steering wheel.

I think I'll be bringing out my white jacket next week as the heatwave is expected to continue. I've only worn that jacket a couple of times, it'll be curious to see what it's like in the summer.

Yep. Look out for yourselves and other people/pets in this kind of weather.

Me ? I'm coping with it my managing how much energy I'm putting out because energy needs heat. I like to think a disciplined mind can control what it thinks about the conditions it finds itself in and that means I just try not to think about the heat. Because if you think about it, you start noticing it and your mind starts to play its tricks on you.

That said though, I'm also trying to do the right things to allow my body to cope with the heat. Sleeves rolled up at work (and the arms have improved to the point where they don't scare my coworkers as much), drinking lots of water, drinking less of the hot coffee and :

Potions Of Brain Freezing. In that case, it was a strawberry milkshake to go with a steak for dinner after doing the initial washing machine scout. But yesterday it was a Mint Choc Cooler Frostino before getting a weekly shop in.

They're good stuff.

I thought the heat was disrupting the computer as well the other evening. I have slipped into another Stellaris playthrough ... this time as the Rootlin Devouring Swarm who aim to avoid many of the more annoying mechanics brought into the game by ... eating everyone they come across. Literally. The Rootlin Swarm has a strong appetite for runs. Runs ? Erm, that would be who they're named after. I may have been watching cricket while creating the race. I hope they don't eat anyone who gives them the runs.

Oh and check out that randomly generated starting system ... one of the updates has allowed for more variation in the star systems, in this case it's a triple star system. Disrupting the computer ? The game was running like treacle in the Thursday session ... but it recovered well in the last session I did yesterday. The Rootlins have reached the point where an Equivalent race barely even gave them a speed bump as they were overtaken and eaten so the interest has somewhat gone out of that game now. There is more challenge though, the game hasn't reached the Midgame or Endgame crisis points yet where stronger enemies appear.

I reopened Elite again as well today and did some bimbling around the star system cluster I left the ship in. I was surprised by how much Empire rank I'd reached, there are only about 3 to go before the big ship is unlocked. I didn't stay in game too long though, the heat is making me not really want to go to that tunnel vision state I go into when I'm well into a game.

I've been buying more things ... It's the Steam sale at the moment and I've picked up the first person game Prey and top down fast tactics game Heat Signature. Both show themselves to be cracking games when on stream/videos.

That reminds me ! Gotta update the links on the right to include a FuzzyFreak person who has been great fun to watch on streams. She's a crazy one, definitely enjoys the games and is why I've bought Prey ... Possibly the spaceship building Empyrion too.

Musicwise, I've picked up the Deadmau5 collection. It's a different type of music to my usual but I've always admired how well made their music is. As far as the ones picked up last week go :

Snow Patrol - good ... but I think some of their inspiration has gone. I haven't heard any of the amazing tracks like Set the Fire to the Third Bar, Chasing Cars or Lifening.
Chvrches - very good (I have to admit my mind has tunneled into the games while their stuff has been on !). They make fun, energetic music to listen to.
Banks - very good again, great voice there.
Jack White - not bad. Again, nothing special like Seven Nation Army.

And I'm currently listening to the end of Jean-Michel Jarre's The Rendezvous. There's also a Heychrissa stream on and a KatherineOfSky video while Idle Champions does its grinding thing.

To the book now though ! X Wing Mercy Kill is proving to be very good so far. I'd recommend you start with the first Aaron Allston Wraith Squadron books though, they were mad.

Book 21 - Afterlife and a ... fair few semi random things

Book 21 !

Cracking through them still, although I sense a slowing in the summer with the heat we have now. Car was reporting 30 degrees C in the covered car park at the Mall earlier.

Book ?

It's Blake's 7, Afterlife written by Tony Attwood who compiled the Programme Guide. The book was publised in 1984, following up on the series which ran from 1978 to 1981. It was one of the classic 70s/80s sci fi series. Good stories, little bit (often very) weird, minimal budget to support it but keeping it all about the characters who were an edgy bunch for this one.

This one only has 5 characters returning from the series and concentrates on a much smaller cast. It picks up on and explains what happened at the end of season 4 (spoilers!) and then carries on a story from there.

The good parts of this book were that the characters were instantly recognisable. From ruthless Avon, to cowardly Vila and then tyrannical Servalan (plus 2 more!). When reading the dialogue, I had that minds eye picture of the original actors playing out the scenes. And I haven't watched Blake's 7 in years.

The bad part was that it felt like a miniseries worth of episodic sections, all pretty separate from each other with tenuous linkages between them. It felt like the author didn't really know what to do with the great characters or where he wanted to take them.

That said though ... this is a far superior book to Lucifer which didn't belong in the Blake's 7 universe. Oh - I remembered what the other thing I labelled like that was : Alien Covenant, although that was a decent movie (unlike Lucifer) that shouldn't have had the Alien tag on it.

Next book ?

XWing Wraith Squadron - Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston. Enjoying it so far after 63 of 414 pages. I didn't want to put it down to go to bed last night. Honest ! More later.

Random stuff ?

Washing machine - need a new one. It's been wearing down for quite some time now but on Saturday it went the WHAM of a probable failed bearing and the drum doesn't really want to turn any more. So I'll buy one of those and get it in over the next fortnight. I got away with it on the wash ... there was only about 2 minutes to go before WHAM occurred.
Music buying - tonight's Mall run saw cds from Jack White, Chvrches, Snow Patrol and Banks appear. Looking forward to listening to those.
Waiting for music buying - Kasey Musgrave's album is wanted and listening to Gorillaz Humans yesterday has changed my mind on getting their next. (Still not getting Arctic Monkey's new one though). Still waiting for Ed Sheeran's latest to go cheaper. It's taking a while !
Not cable buying - Jessops guy didn't want to know. I found them a tad rude and I won't be going back any time soon. Besides, there's a camera shop in town who were very helpful when I acquired my camera.
Not laptop buying - no issues, the John Lewis lady who has answered my questions a few times is very helpful. They just don't have what I want. Although the Dell XPS reduced to £880 in clearance was VERY shiny. Too expensive.

What else ?

It's warm out at the moment. Looks like we'll have this for a week until it breaks into rain. In the meantime, pass the ice cubes !

Right - too hot to play the games at the moment (and I'm wary that opening Stellaris now will lead to closing it at 1.30am. Or later). Book plus videos, possible stream watching if an interesting person comes online !

Oh and ... sneak preview of a later post :

Could that be part of Book 22 ?

The tiniest X Wing

Bit more Lego therapy today.

There's more of that to come because a Rather Large Parcel arrived in the post ... More of that later. But first .... teaser pic !

What could the new arrival be ?

From humble beginnings ...

A sturdy shell.

An elegant fuselage.

Four powerful engines.

A pair of wings ... Wait. Something's missing ?

There we go. And it's already off to battle the Empire.

Cruising to the scene of the battle ... (and yes, that is an envelope providing my contrast background !)

S Foils to Attack Position ...

And form up in formation, STAY ON TARGET ! And watch out for those Tie Fighters.

This one was from Comic Con and it was a lovely little quick build. If you want one, Ebay should point you in the right direction, here's the packet with the kit number !

But I've had the mini XWing waiting for me for a while. What arrived today ?

Something shiny. Looking forward to putting both of those together.

Book 20 - a Story of Battletech (plus more from the weekend)

Is it cheeky claiming the story of a game as a book ?

Perhaps. Some games are blurring the line there though. Either it's a game that's more about the story or it's a visual novel with gameplay elements within. And then there are the old Fighting Fantasy style books that were a game in a book.

But Battletech ... a common element of strategy games like this will be to use a story to tie together the missions perhaps with a good few randomly generated missions thrown in too for either padding the game length out or to give your people something to do between story missions to make them stronger.

I'm going to start off with a : The story isn't awful.

That's a really bad thing to say about it isn't it .... The story in Battletech starts off brightly with you having to flee the planet where you are employed, escaping just ahead of a coup. It is a classic set up where the bad guys take over at the start and your role is to gather strength so you can counter usurp them later. Oh and the bad guys are really really bad. Our people are plucky mercenaries pretty much on the neutral side of neutral. But we're getting paid the big bucks to help out the former leader of the Aurigan Reach.

I definitely enjoyed the game ... but there is some real boneheaded stuff in the backstory leading through. Sometimes it feels like characters are doing stupid things just to kick off elements of the story.

Mind you, the movie Interstellar was just like that as well and that's a film I'll watch repeatedly. Sure, the set up is nasty but what they do with that is fantastic.

There's good voice acting here, I actually thought it was Maggie Q playing the leader for a while.

So Battletech - a great game, story could have been better as it reached its end but then the aim of the story in these games is to set up great missions and I think it does that. It may actually prompt me to look at some Battletech books. A while ago, I read the Mechwarrior Dark Age - Ghost War book by Michael Stackpole and highly enjoyed it.

But I'm not likely to go straight back in to replay the campaign. I'm actually more likely to replay MechCommander 2 from a good few years ago.

To the weekend ?

I needed the recovery time from Lords. My legs were definitely feeling that. And then I go straight into an all nighter watching Le Mans. Not as good a race this year as the racing has been. Let's see :

Toyota were unchallenged and their only reliability issue this year was an error in the head of one of the drivers when he missed his "You need to pit now" and almost ran out of fuel.
Jenson Button's car decided to throw a bad sensor, which put them 50 laps behind. They were racing hard when they got back in the race but the car expired about 90 minutes before the end. A shame. Hope he's back next year.
Aston Martin's car just didn't work for them this year. They said it was very good with speed and handling up to a certain point ... where it felt like it was hitting a brick wall. So the Aston Martins came nowhere. Hope they figure that one out.

Gaming - finished Battletech ! See above.
Finished Motorsport Manager too, with the last few races of the season. The other teams were keeping me honest by making sure I couldn't get away without thinking through strategy for the last few races but my team still reigned supreme. This is a snowballing type of game, where if you set things up right, the team will continue to march ahead of the competition. That gets boring ...

All nighter ? I managed to stay awake for the whole of the race ! I wouldn't recommend that. I think the hallucinations were starting to come in at about 9pm last night and I was definitely feeling it even by around 4pm yesterday.

I may have ordered more Lego too.

The laptop replacement is being pushed right again. The place I'd get it from have pushed the price up by £50 and that definitely tips it over into "ain't worth it". Oh and one of the issues with the last one where I thought the screen was burning out has been fixed by ....... turning the brightness up.

Back to work tomorrow ! More chill out tonight.

Sporty Saturday. And Thursday. And Sunday.

Le Mans today !

Actually been quite busy over this week, although busy actually means "busy recovering" for some of that.

Wednesday was a business trip, Thursday was Lords. Friday was recovering from Lords (left house at 7am, got back in at 1am, needed until about 3.30am until sleep would be reasonable). Saturday morning currently sees me watching the build up to Le Mans on the telly* and the cricket in another window on my desktop as I type. I also have the Idle Champions game running in yet another window. Having sport on my desktop means no gaming ... but that doesn't exclude the simple clicker game.

Cricket will continue until probably 7pm, at which point I'll head off to acquire pizza while I have Le Mans paused for catching up later in the myriad advert breaks. Le Mans racing will go from about 2.30pm to 2.30pm tomorrow.

*Cricket on desktop, Le Mans on telly ? Hopefully it has improved but in previous years it has proved a nightmare to watch the Eurosport on computer. You usually have to buy another subscription for something I already have a subscription to watch. Not doing that.

Lords ?

Was looking great as usual. There was a light drizzle as I arrived, heading through the back of the ground to the main stadium. Off to the left is the Nursery practice ground with that curiously modern Media Centre (wiki link) opened in 1999. Crikey, almost 20 years ago already.

Home of cricket putting its best sides forward, despite the drizzly start. They did very well to get play happening on time.

Army batting first against Navy bowling. It was a tight start but the Army batsmen broke out of the shackles later on to score 149.

As is usual for these, click for bigger. Most of the pictures are from my Canon Ixus 265 compact digital camera, which I love. A picture like the one above was taken at full optical zoom (16x) with it braced rather agriculturally on my knee. It's great for these long shots when it has that bracing, not so much for close shots where the focusing isn't quite quick enough to cut out any shake or motion blur. I do like it when I get the timing right to get the ball in shot though.

Navy celebrate the fall of another Army wicket.

A comfortable crowd providing a little bit of atmosphere. These games pull in a few people, both from Interservices support (like me!) and a few Lords regulars who want to watch the cricket in a great stadium. They open up the Mound and Tavern stands to the public but not the other stand on the other side. The Pavilion is for members only. Smart people. Not me !

We had drama throughout the day, including here where the fielder looks perplexed and more than a tad frustrated after his efforts to secure an excellent running in catch were wiped away by it being a no-ball for the bowler overstepping.

Half time and we're off to hunt down some tea.

Pitch must have been nicely lively.

Especially with the Army bowlers lobbing in grenades.

We had a minute of silence observed on Thursday for the Grenfell Tower Block disaster. The teams paused the game a few minutes early to line up in front of the Pavilion.

And the crowd stood in their own mark of respect. A wonderfully observed minute of silence and I'd particularly note how everyone anticipated it, like this picture being taken a couple of minutes before with everyone standing in respect already. It was more like a 5 minutes of silence.

Back to the cricket and the Army celebrate a steady fall of Navy wickets. This time a batsman looking rather perplexed at being given lbw.

An aggressive stride ! But I don't the ball has gone quite where he intended ... To steal a phrase from history, "What's wrong with our bats today ?" "Sir, I don't think they're using their bats." Navy come a distant third, losing by 42 runs.

The winners get a break in this tournament with the losers staying on for the second game, so next up was the Navy vs the RAF.

RAF started brighter but the wickets started coming again. This opener got a tickly one.

RAF get 149 again, time for the Navy to take their turn. They have an ok side but haven't been in the same league as RAF or Army for the last few years.

Lots of ambition though.

But they could never keep up with the rate as the wickets fell and were well short at the end. RAF win by 49.

There is no lonelier figure in cricket than the Number 11 batsman walking away from shattered stumps at the moment of defeat.

Time for another break and the best tea shop in Lords ! It's under the new Warner stand.

Game 3 ! Army vs RAF, winner gets the trophy. The RAF batted well here with power and occasional skill :

A subtle guiding of the ball and the RAF finish on 147. Time for the Army !

The Army walked into a bit of a stranglehold, struggling to get any runs away. This was representative of the energy shown by the RAF in the field, appealing vigorously for this lbw. His partner was out shortly after and the Army continually struggled to get up with the run rate.

More subtlety on show, this time from the Army batsmen guiding the ball down to the boundary.

And more lusty blows. Oh and look !!!! SHADOWS !!!!!!! The sun was hiding for most of the day but came out to play a bit later.

It was not to be for the Army though this year as wickets continued to fall, like the sharp stumping above. (I'm especially happy with this shot, the focus is decent, the centreing is reasonable and .... flying bails !)

At the conclusion of proceedings, handshakes all round. Recognition of great play and sportsmanship all round. RAF come out the winners with tea and medals following soon after.

The results weren't particularly close or tense like in previous years but it was a very enjoyable day at the cricket again. The old master can be proud again of what he overlooked :

I'll be back again to say hello to Lords and Old Father Time.