A Little Lego ... oh and Steam sales happened.

December is almost here ! Which means Star Wars Lego Advent Calendar again ....

Looking forward to that. But ... here's a little teaser.

Can you tell what it is yet ? A smaller kit this time and yep, there's a preview in the background.

A humble beginning.

A sturdy centre building up.

A central ball, nearly complete.

Engines at the back.

Suddenly TIE Fighter !

And a different angle. There's a sudden jump to the end because you attach one wing at a time and it's a bit lopsided with just the one wing.

A good counterpart to the older little XWing that I have.

There we go. An enjoyable quick build, both of them.

Did I mention Steam sales ? It's the first one of the season, following the Black Friday mania. It's a good time for acquiring games, with a couple of Steam sales plus I'll be contributing to the Yogscast Jingle Jam as well which comes with games. It'll be odd choosing when I give the contribution because the main channel and most of the people there have migrated to a style which .... I'm definitely not a fan of. Just means I don't watch them and instead watch the people I enjoy (their links are in the right hand column). There is that charity (and many games/soundtracks) thing though.

The acquisitions this time around have been Skyrim Special Edition, which has given me an excuse for another restart and because it has all of the DLCs, I can mod the hell out of it ....

This is the new Bashara, which is going to be built as a heavily armoured tank with a big bashing thing. The character model is very definitely enhanced there, plus the rest of the textures have been upgraded too.

Skyrim Special Edition (plus mods) is above, this one is from a still modded but a bit less ordinary Skyrim.

I haven't actually got to the city of Whiterun there yet, so no comparative looks. But it should look a lot better with the mods.

What else ?
Glass Masquerade is a lovely little puzzle game which I've been trying out in short doses.
Slay the Spire is a card based adventure game, not tried yet.
Bomber Crew is a WW2 bomber game. I'd hesitate to call it a simulation.
Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a space strategy combat game.
And I've saved a little bit of the vouchers that the old team at work got me so I can put them towards the Stellaris DLC coming in a couple of weeks.

More to come in the Jingle Jam ! Probably .... more to come in the Steam Xmas sale. I've also got my eye on a game called Starsector, which is another space strategy game. Gotta finish the ones I have my head in at the moment though, which means :

Adventuring in Skyrim .... and continuing the campaign of Space Viking Racing in Motorsport Manager. My mob just got promoted to the top league and there's a lot of catching up to do.

Trips away, trips future, gaming ?

I did the traveling thing last weekend.

Good to see the mum and sister and one of the Double D boys again. Thoroughly enjoyed that bit of the weekend.

Me bringing the bluray up and us watching a couple of films on the Saturday is becoming a tradition too. This weekend it was Star Wars The Last Jedi and the first Fantastic Beasts film. I'm fearing for Star Wars now ... I still enjoy watching The Last Jedi, mostly due to watching Rey's emergence and definitely for the fun character which is Rose. But it really feels like they are scraping the bottom of a creativity barrel in Star Wars now. Solo was a mixed bag of good and contrived bad and Last Jedi was going down the Alien Covenant / Prometheus path in what it was doing to the established This Is Star Wars stuff.

On the other hand, I thought Fantastic Beasts was an amazing film on first watching and that feeling continued through to the second watching. It has a delightful humour running through the film, Eddie Redmayne's performance is inspired and it has a nice little mystery plot waiting to burst out as soon as the introductions are done. The sequel should be fantastic.

I did, of course, pick up loot.

The marshmallows are lush, the brownie was gorgeous and the Creme Egg (yes that is an Easter Egg) is cursed in that it is still in my mum's fridge.

I am regretting my life choices though. I left this in the shop :

And the shop is now 200 miles away.

A good trip. I'm looking forward to downtime next weekend though, ahead of a switch in what job I'm doing which will see me immediately have a couple of days out of the office next week.

Yes. They are letting me out of the office again ....

But that's work and it isn't marshmallows.

They are definitely tasty. And too good to scoff down in one session. I have a couple at a time, savour them and then the remainder go into that tin with a fairly well sealable lid to keep them fresh.

Oh ... trips future also includes me being highly likely to head up to Chester for a meet up of the Roll4it crew. I already avidly follow what they're up to, especially Maggie Krohn, FuzzyFreaks and Enter Elysium (links over on the right hand column !). They've brought a good bunch of people together who make very watchable content and it'd be good to say hi. And then maybe visit something touristy around the Chester area the next day.

Indeed one phrase I never thought I'd hear myself say again is "AWESOME Love you Maggie" (some readers will know why !) yet that is one phrase that came out today. I like doing those photo edits for people and other assorted doodle level of thing. I don't have much talent as an artist but I do like making ideas come to fruition through photo editing. It's awesome when the creations get a happy reaction from the people they're intended for. That makes it so much more worth it making the Thing.

Here are a couple of the latest :

The credit has to go to the original artists as all I did was do a couple of recolours on the Mag Gran on the left and I gave the one on the right a wink.

Yet these did not just get a "That's great Sleepy, love it !", the Mag Gran is now one of her chosen emotes and the Mag Wink became the icon for her Discord server for about 5 minutes (the icon is now a festive UFO).

Seeing the creations actually put to use makes me very happy.

I was going to talk about gaming too .... Maybe another day because there's a lot in that list. It's the first day of another Steam sale and I already have a couple of games in the basket :

Bomber Crew - a cartoonish simulator of a WW2 bomber and its crew. (link to Enter Elysium playlist)
Glass Masquerade - a glass mosaic puzzle game which looked amazing when Katherine Of Sky (link to playlist) showed it off.

And then there's Skyrim .... which I might acquire on Special Edition for £15. I'm also considering resetting my Elite pilot again back to zero. That's the pattern I had way back in the original Elite, where I'd get to Dangerous or Deadly, get bored and start again. I find it more fun to build up and consistently change things than to grind through doing exactly the same routines.

There is that thing though with the games where sometimes, the game is more fun to watch someone else play than it is to play it yourself. Games like Blood Bowl, which is on the wishlist ...

More about the gaming soon ! And the Lego. I owe you a couple of Lego posts, I still have the Ladies of NASA kits to build and then there's Star Wars Advent approaching ....

Cya soon.

Random Birthdayness

Birthday again earlier in the week !

Yes I am even older now.

I've been kinda neglecting this place lately .... I'm one of those people who can blast through things up to a certain point but when I get a chance to relax, the energy will go and I'll be in recovery mode. So everything's been going into work at the moment and then I need to crash out later.

And I'm definitely tending to the crashing out rather than feeling like posting things.

I'm behind on posts like :

2x Lego builds
Yesterday's ship visit.

Ok, here's a pic from yesterday :

Pretty ship is shiny. She's the SS Great Britain, a revolutionary steam sailing ship that rewrote the book on how ships are powered by being the first propeller driven ship. I had an enjoyable wandering around this lovely ship. But that's for another post .....

We had a work meet up in town, which was very enjoyable and I also tried out the Christmas Market in town last Friday.

Yep. Christmas is coming .... A sausage-inna-bun was devoured and I've been making my way through the special fudge that appeared from the market. I've also been getting quietly addicted to Kola Kubes again. I'm looking to check out the Cardiff and Bath Xmas markets this year.

There is no Happy Cookie Place again this year ! NOOOO ! Hopefully cookies will appear at Cardiff or Bath.

There was a Flake Break meet up last weekend, which was good fun. I was a bit nonplussed by the tribute band though, he was enthusiastic but with him covering Olly Mars and Bruno Murs, I don't know either of them. It was great to meet up with people again, first time I've seen them since the last one 5 years ago ... and I was suffering from a concussion then which was affecting me more than I realised.

Birthday Tuesday ! I acquired the cakes on Monday and was highly enjoying exhorting people passing my desk to raid the cakes. I was in a better position this year to do that. And then yesterday involved wandering around the great ship until I felt the crash starting to creep up on me.

I'm also enjoying the women's cricket world cup. There are more close games now in the women's game as the lesser nations are catching up to England, India, Aussie and South Africa. At the moment, it's New Zealand vs Pakistan and it's looking like New Zealand's bowlers will quite comfortably see them through to a win. 5 wickets down already ....

Not much gaming happening, as a combination of that crashing out plus a poorly wrist. Lots of gaming being watched and enjoyed though.

Looking forward to the Xmas break. Especially as following it will be :

Soon.

Looking at the tech again

I appear to be struggling for subjects again, which is a little odd because there are two Lego builds waiting to be posted.

Sometime. Soon.

Or something ate the ideas when I wasn't looking. Maybe.

I did read something today though which made me think back to why I was looking to retire my old Macbook and replace it with something newer. It was an overly techie story about people installing Linux on their Macbooks, apparently the security on the newer Macs don't let you do that. The daft question from me is : Why would any sane person want to do that ? I get the "Because I can" reason ... but still. Apple hardware is excellent but you can get non Apple laptops that are better and cheaper to put Linux on. Linux on Apple hardware feels like a special kind of heresy.

Yep.

Anyway - the story made me remember some of the reasons why I stepped away from Apple. The big one is their attitude to customers. It feels as though you don't buy your Apple kit, you lease it until such a time as they see fit to disable it or disable features that you depended on.

For me, I couldn't go past iTunes 10.7 because it has a feature I use exclusively for my music listening. The iTunes DJ feature was replaced by a totally inadequate feature in iTunes 11. Because Apple then decided to make newer iOS versions not talk to iTunes 10.7, I had to retire my iPhone as a phone because I couldn't keep it secure. Trust me on : you don't want your phone to have security holes.

There was also the thing where I couldn't use a USB wifi widget (to get around partly broken wifi on the laptop) because Apple disabled the support for third party widgets as well. And I think there were a few other issues as well. I haven't actually turned on the Macbook since getting its replacement, not even to copy the pictures and other documents over. Oops.

That's enough whinging about the tech though.

Sleeping better at the moment, which might be due to increased tiredness. The acid that was troubling me has been more controllable, although I need to delete the tendency to attack my legs. They're not quite healed yet but they are much closer. There is that conditioned tendency to do more damage though. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

I had donuts earlier. The aftermath involved someone telling me I'd had too many donuts. I can't remember what I'd said now to invoke that. It may well have involved ruff jokes.

Donuts earlier, quite possibly popcorn in a few minutes after I hit the post button.

No gaming today though. My wrist doesn't like me very much at the moment so it'll be watching gaming while leafing through Persepolis Rising. That's book 7 of The Expanse while I take a little break from the British Stargate story.

Oh - birthday soon ! Not long to go. I'll be acquiring things. Edible things mostly. But we shall see what we find as well. I'll be raiding the Bristol Xmas market on Friday afternoon ...

Oh wait. I think I just said a taboo word.

HAPPY COOKIE PLACE RETURNS IN A COUPLE OF DAYS !!!!

I hope. See ya !