Sketchily sketching sketches

I've been attempting to learn to draw again ....

Before I launch into that though, lots of things are still going on and I feel really busy and I can't remember very much of it ! Honestly, I think I got a little burned out doing Star Wars Advent this year and I'm still bouncing back from that. I hoped they were high quality posts and I enjoyed the making of them but I was definitely feeling a bit of pressure to get 3 distinct books every day without just going down the list of one, two or three particular authors.

Oh - there's been some background feelings going on that are affecting me but I'm definitely not going to be going into those here except to cryptically say that it's 1 year on.

Sketch ? Here's the latest :

There we go. Art skills of a 5 year old. Except that's probably an insult to your typical terror with crayons.

That's actually one inspiration for the drawing thing. Ideas have been popping into the head mostly as per the usual thing. I'll see something and an idea will spark off. Usually an idea that is way, way beyond my talents but .... maybe in quite some time (I reckon a decade and by then arthritis will probably have overtaken my hands).

Talking of a 5 year old with crayons, here's one from last week :

Yep. Stick men. I thought .... skill level of a 5 year old ! Let's own that. And it was most amusing to see people in chat requesting fan art of a non player character called B'ebb (he's a massive show favourite) and .... people following that by saying that there was fan art by B'ebb ... and linking it.

I depend heavily on my self confidence and when I unleash one of these creations on an unsuspecting world, my default is to think that people hate it. That's the way my mind works. No feedback = they think it's nasty. The depressive side of manic-depressive tendencies really sucks that way.

So when people, totally unprompted (I was hiding), pull out the pictures and show them to the stream ... and people seem to love it, yep. That's me going to Super Happy Sleepy Mode.

Oh ... there's a lot of references there and you'd need to be up to speed with the show (on Roll4it link to the right) to catch them. It's been great fun tuning into this light hearted capering on a Sunday evening.

That was the second Stargate drawing ! Here's the first again :

Jaffa Kree PD ! Last picture from the Stargate selection so far :

Chalk this time ! So a mix of two types of arty thing this time. The original blackboard was nicked from a stock site but the rest is me. So there's chalk from our B'ebb with the stick men again ... with all of the cast this time. Papa'Rak (aka Ga'Rak) is intentionally twice as tall as everyone else. And then there's me looking to draw people again.

I think that's it for today with the really bad art.

I hope I'm showing signs of improvement. There are other pictures that have been done that you aren't allowed to see :-D. One is a pic that might not be seen by anybody ... (Too scared) and the other is one that was supposed to be a "We're all here for you" message for a person on one of the Discord servers who is in a really bad place at the moment and the Discord people are rallying around to give them an internet hug. Hope they're ok. I struggle to know the right words to say at times like that (and coincidentally this particular day today for me and I'm not going to expand on that) but sometimes the best thing you can do is keep being around people, give them time, let them know that they're free and encouraged to show their emotions around you. And that's especially the sad ones.

Cos if we bottle those sad emotions in, we'll break.

I hope you all got some positive feedback today.

Oh and that Dragon in the Easter Egg pic may well be a harbinger of this year's Easter Avatar ... Not felt like eating that egg yet though !

That's last year's Easter Pic. Nite all.

Week of Random

Ever get those weeks where you have been really busy but when you look back on it, you're not sure what you were getting up to ?

Feels like last week has been one of those.

(Picture is from someone called Organbutt, made for the Drawception game. I hope you won with it !)

I have been getting chance to catch up on the recorded stuff, both in games and on the telly. The start to the latest Star Trek Discovery series was excellent and I suspect I will be a big fan of Captain Christopher Pike through this series. He stole the show on his debut episode.

The Orville has also been as fun to watch so far this series as it was last series. I'm not convinced that I'm going to stick with the DC Universe series on Sky though. Those have lost their way and I think they ran out of stories a couple of seasons ago.

I have my vouchers from the credit card loyalty thing ! Still got most of them. The only acquisitions so far have been Old Man's War by John Scalzi and Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I'm still kinda grinding my way through his Children of Time, which apparently has a sequel coming.

The cricket on the telly is showing a game with an incident that I still hold a grudge for (Eng vs NZ ODI in 2008). It's the infamous incident where an umpire intervened to attempt to get the England captain to change his decision on a run out. Lots of bad behaviour involved, pretty much all of it on the side of the New Zealand players. What happened ? A NZ batsman (Grant Elliott) who has been involved in many other incidents, including abusing his own team mates while on the field, ran straight at the bowler and knocked him out of the way. He was knocked down too, resulting in an easy run out.

The umpire intervened to attempt to get England to withdraw the run out appeal, when they really should have given the guy out "Obstructing the field" instead. The batsman ran straight down the wicket, as they should ... however there was no intention or effort to avoid the bowler who was coming for the ball. It felt pretty clear at the time. Still does.

That's in the past though. I've been playing Battletech again. And there's bad behaviour around this one too, believe it or not.

Spaceship ! That's the Argo, which (light spoiler) is the ship you play out most of the game flying around in to various places to go stompy stompy with your Battlemechs.

They did a decent job with this one in its vanilla form, although they're getting heavily criticised for a poor DLC (costing £15.49 which is too much in my opinion) that doesn't add very much. The game has to be installed on a SSD or it's frustrating to run ... but I was enjoying bouncing from battle to battle on it this morning as my force of mechs and pilots steadily build up their initial training skills and strength. More story soon.

It's a shame the lead designer has been hounded off Twitter, although that's a reflection on how poor Twitter is at controlling harassment on its site. I keep a very low profile on that site and steer clear of the potential harassment. It's not worth your time or mental energy to interact with people like that, just stick to the good ones and don't hesitate to block the bad ones.

One thing I would like to do is mod the game to expand on the basic mechanics. They're a bit dumbed down compared to the original tabletop game rules. I'd like some of that complexity back. But .... while there is a mod to do that (called Roguetech), it's a huge collection of a bunch of other mods that I don't think play well together. They also replace the original story campaign with something open ended and ... boring.

I've had a quick look at Roguetech and either it's beyond the capabilities of my PC (which is just over 7 years old to be honest) or ... it's broken and otherwise unplayable. I'm actually going with the broken and unplayable because I'm suspecting that the massive slowdowns I'm seeing in the strategic layer are due to Roguetech trying to talk to the servers that run the online campaign and just freezes while doing so. Or it's needing a bit more memory than my PC wants to give it.

Anyway, byebye Roguetech and if anyone's got a line to a mod that expands the equipment and customisation options out without crippling the game, let me know in the comments. Oh there's also a bit of he said/she said playground level behaviour in the forums over there which just looks a bit silly.

Oh and a new Battletech campaign run means more names to think up ...

Games, many games, frustration at the games ... Stargate ?

I've been having fun with the games today.

Fun in the senses of bashing your head against the wall as well as enjoying playing them.

Yesterday was fine, it was a mix of Skyrim and Motorsport Manager. I've fairly heavily modded Skyrim since getting the Special Edition and it seems far more resilient and stable in that version. It's still pretty much a run across the country randomly murdering people who get in the way though.

And very pretty too as a game. Even as a 7 year old game. I think that screenshot benefits from a water effects mod and I have a pretty town graphics mod too and a series of others. Oh it's also benefiting from being played on a nVidia 1060 card, which is more powerful than any of the cards on the market when Skyrim first came out.

It is still pretty much a murder simulator though as your character runs around doing the quests. I haven't taken a side in the civil war yet in case it causes issues but I know which side I'll take. Similarly, there's one mod which I'll try later that I won't use yet because I think it'll cause issues.

That's the thing with mods, they look great but can cause the issues.

What does get annoying is where the issues aren't caused by the mods, they're inherent in the game itself. That's really frustrating. Problem games recently include :

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol - this would run a bit on my laptop ... and then crash to desktop not long after. Annoying. Haven't gone back to that.
Grey Goo - is a strategy game from a few years ago that I really should have tried before now ! But I fired it up today and had the usual issues where it resizes all of my desktop windows and to top that off, tried to fit itself in a window that wasn't the right size and was black. No joy with that one.

I think that's partly an issue with my monitor actually. It's a fantastic 1440p monitor but ... I have display scaling enabled in order to make the text appear in a size that is readable. However, games get confused by the display scaling. Or they're just obnoxious.

Star Wars Empire at War is the latest for the hall of shame - this one was playable as far as I tried it today but had a massive problem with flickering on the screen. I don't think I have the condition where people have massive issues with flickering but ... I dislike it and it's not something I would want to be tolerating in a game.

(I'm trying Empire at War again due to the dissatisfaction with Stellaris at the moment)

And I had a look at Battletech again today. I quite enjoyed playing through the campaign last year. It's a solid game, if heavily lacking in variety. The standard thing is for your lance of mechs to go into battle against a force around twice its number, albeit weakened. I tried the Roguetech mod again today which ... massively opens up the variety but it proved unsatisfying to play due to massive slowdowns. (It was maxing out the 8GB of memory available in my computer).

So that's 1 good, 4 annoying, last one for today is Motorsport Manager, which continues to be a fun one. I ran through 3 races this morning and my people are starting to win races ...

That one was a bit of an aberration as the AI teams and drivers weren't doing well with the rainy conditions in that qualifying session.

This is a cracking game and the best ever of its type, in my opinion. (There isn't much competition as the last good one was Grand Prix Manager 1/2 in 1996). It's properly testing and will punish mistakes while having a strategic layer that needs figuring out before you start to win.

The team could win the championship this year. We shall see ...

Back to fiction though ...

I've got the Stargate Horizons episode on in another window. It's reminded me about Stargate again. They start it off again in about a week ! Definitely queuing up that one for another watching.

PS If anyone recognises the first dragon pic as being theirs ... please do drop me a comment or an email and I'll supply proper attribution. Google found it from a betting site and I'm definitely not linking to that)

Random Squirrel

SQUIRREL !

Up is a great film. I'd highly recommend you see it. Kinda connected to the pictures coming ? Concerning random squirrels though, I kinda wish I could show a picture or two of the squirrel-friends that run around the site at work. Can't take pictures at work though. They're quite brave squirrels ... we'll see them a lot running around the greenery between the paths.

Wait .... Squirrel !

I picked this up before Xmas from a new shop that's opened up in the centre of Bristol. It's another modelling and curiosity type shop and it sells various things including the Jigzle puzzle above from a site that can be found at www.greentanet.com . They have all sorts of things there, like animal kits, architecture, lifestyle, vehicles and movie tie ins. I am highly tempted to pick up another XWing, a Millennium Falcon, definitely their Star Trek Enterprise and they also have the Niffler.

And Dobbie. They have a Dobbie. (And a BB-8)

The first few bits. One thing I'd immediately say is that the laser cut wooden bits are not quite in tolerance (translation - they're not cut enough and are marginally too big) and they fit together very tightly. That means there's no free play between the bits, the models won't fall apart but ... you really shouldn't have to get a wood file, pliers or a hammer to help you put them together.

Yes. That is a hammer.

Coming together with a pair of front paws.

Almost there. The models are made up of a frame comprising large bits of wood and are rounded out by smaller pieces fitting in to more slots and grooves.

Job done ! But let's have a better look from another angle :

Click for bigger as per usual.

On the whole, an enjoyable kit to put together and the finished Random Squirrel is rather cute. Will I get some more from the site ? Quite likely actually. There are a couple of small pieces missing because some of the elements of wood broke away but I'll know to file the grooves open a little more for the next one.

This was a far more satisfying kit to put together than the attempt at a Metal Earth kit. I'll go back to those when they intimidate me less but I barely got the central fuselage of my Metal Earth XWing together before giving up. It was too fiddly and wasn't cooperating with the staying together while being put together thing.

Shiny !

Oh and the wood smells amazing.

Movies and Book - Spiderman Arrival Rising Evil

A few things to mention today ....

Haha, partly because going into depth on 2 of them will lead to massive spoilers !

Yep. Gratuitous use of spider picture. The spiderfriend above is a gift from FuzzyFreaks (link on the right hand column) who is a lovely, crazy, batty, funny streamer who I've been enjoying watching over the last 6 months since finding the channel.

Recommended. Check her out, at the moment especially if you're interested in pirate sailing games. Yep, the Fuzzy One is well and truly addicted to Atlas, a pirate ship MMO.

First film of the day ! Spiderman into the Spiderverse. This one is an animated charmer of a movie, opening with its star, Miles Morales. He gets bitten by a spider and .... you know what happens after that. Definitely an origin story movie but .... you gotta start somewhere. It brings in a number of other great characters along the way, including more than a few surprises.

I cannot recommend this movie sufficiently. After being somewhat in the doldrums over the Xmas break, this film kinda hit that reset button and got me charged up again. (Haha, until the next day when lack of sleep was getting the better of me).

Go see it and .... I think it's one of those films that genuinely benefits from being in the cinema too with the scale of the visuals. I'd see it again in the cinema before it goes, given the excuse.

(Yes, that's giving you the excuse to give me the excuse to watch it again).

I watched Arrival today after getting home from work. A curious film. It goes back and forth in a way you cannot truly comprehend. At least not until you've seen it all the way through.

It starts with an alien ... incursion ? Visitation ? Anyway, the aliens are here in 12 ships spread around the globe and no one can find a common frame of reference in which to communicate with them. Until that is, our Louise appears and gets to figuring it out.

Mind bending film. Definitely recommended.

Rising ?

First completed book of the year is Persepolis Rising, book 7 of the Expanse series. This follows the trend of the 6 before, in that it starts off a new trilogy in the series. So this one is set a few decades after the sixth book and the crew of the Rocinante are figuring out what to do next, when all hell breaks loose.

As it does.

Not sure what to make of this book and I'm somewhat in fear for the success of the series. I'll get the next two books (when they drop in price ... and when they're written !) so I get the complete story. I kinda have an unfinished business feeling with series that I don't finish, even if I'm not enjoying them too much. I have to Know.

Anyway, there's a bit of an Irresistable Force vs Immovable Object theme going through this book and ... I wasn't convinced this time that the set up and scenario made sense the way it did with the previous books. The nemesis is rather too strong in this case.

But perhaps that's straying too close to spoiler territory. If you've read the previous 6 books, you know you're going to get this book for the continuation of the story. If you haven't read the others, then you can only start with the first book, Leviathan Wakes.

Last one ! Resident Evil, The Final Chapter.

You know what to expect here. Lots of zombies, guns, Milla Jovovich kicking butt, absolutely zero sense in the story. This time, they start off a little bit of time after the last one finished and revisit old territory. Alice is going back to the Hive.

A fairly enjoyable romp too but ... as for a few of the entries above, you wouldn't be seeing this one unless you've seen the previous films.

So ...

For the thinkers - Arrival was really good.
For absolute fun - Spiderman into the Spiderverse is a must see.
For the space opera - The Expanse continues its epic tale.
For BRAINZZZZZZZZZ - Resident Evil.
For madcap capers in a pirate boat - FuzzyFreaks playing the Atlas.

Back to work tomorrow

Yep.

Back in tomorrow, don't feel ready but I have been hitting that stage where I'm having trouble getting to sleep because I'm not that tired. Oh and also random going to bed times (partly courtesy of games, partly due to watching streaming people on the internet).

Oh ! Happy New Year everyone. Hopefully 2019 will be a good one. I'll want to put 2018 behind me for a few reasons but there are those few steps forward as well.

First ... picture.

Toasty thing is very toasty after a minute in the microwave. (It's a Warmie, it's supposed to be heated up !)

I'm almost better on the outsides ... that's something that's been a long time coming. There are still a few hold out bits that aren't finishing up their healing but those have been looking better after a week of not doing very much at all. I have been pondering putting plasters on again though as I'm literally my own worst enemy with my outsides and keep attacking them. It's become a habit that I definitely need to ditch.

New job ... haven't talked about that much here but it's a move back to engineering and not too far either. I'm still in the same larger team, just a different part of it. It'll be a stepping stone to something higher up either in the same team ... or a different one. We'll see what opportunities are out there over the next year or so.

Bookwise, I set myself a target of 52 books to be read in the year last year. How did I do ? With a little cheating with some short ones, I got up to 29. I still have to write the review for number 29. I had a good start but somewhat stalled in the middle of the year. Probably watching too much cricket and not enough book. Also somewhat too tired to read after a while too. Book number 29 is Persepolis Rising of the Expanse series which I'll write more about soon. This one took a whole 2 months after The Martian ...

It has been good to be reading again and the next one will be on the Kindle again, either Children of Time or Thrawn of Timothy Zahn. I also have book 1 in the Annihilation series to read on the Kindle plus a few books donated by my mum. Lots to read. Oh ! The book about horrid games too should be a good chuckle.

One thing I need to definitely do over the next year is get cracking on sorting out the house. There's new jobs adding to the old jobs that I haven't had the energy to tackle over the last few years.

Yep. Back in tomorrow, which means :

That's tomorrow and I need to do a Mall run after work as well.

Doctor Who's new year special was good. It wasn't Weeping Angels like the pic above (I personally really dislike the Weeping Angels, they're a jump scare alien that doesn't actually make any sense outside of plot devices).

Colder today due to something apparently called an Omega Block where a high pressure bubble is trapped over GB. That causes the clouds to disappear and all the heat to escape. Wonder if we'll get snow again this year ? I did enjoy the little snow expedition last March, although I was very glad to get back indoors and put the kettle on.

Last thought - I've been seeing stories about the expedition to check out the Ultima Thule asteroid. They have a picture :

That looks familiar ...

Cya !