Games, music, more games, broken sleep pattern

One more day and then back to work !

And hopefully back to the normal sleep pattern. Stellaris isn't good for normal patterns.

What have I been up to .... I was feeling pretty burned out at the start of the break. The way my body works is that I'll soak up pressure and tiredness up until a certain point ... and then probably go beyond that point into areas that get a bit silly.

I'm not talking about opening Stellaris at noon and closing it again at 1 (am). No, this is more like not anticipating conditions (it's suddenly gone into near summer weather here !), possibly nearing heatstroke and generally hitting the limits of what I think I can do at the moment ... and then going beyond.

(The latest is Friday, which I promised someone I wouldn't talk about too much !)

Friday was a good opportunity to grab the pizza though. Even if that ended up being a still eating at 11pm thing.

That's another sign of my personal time clock shifting when I'm on leave, or playing Stellaris. I was munching dinner at 11pm again last night, that's not good for all sorts of reasons. But that's bad stuff, what about the fun ?

This week's been about chilling out, to the games, to the music, to catching up on watching stuff. Stellaris has soaked up a lot of time again, with a fella called Quill18 (youtube guy who I watch a little of) going for the 200 years of peace achievement. So I thought I'd see about turning the gameplay back to something simpler and seeing about collecting the achievements. I'm up to 52 now out of 95, with 40 coming in the last couple of weeks. Including that 200 years of peace (it was actually 325).

Fun times, mixed in with a lot of terror when the crisis events happened. The trick to the peace as a pacifist race is being strong enough that no one wants to try and attack, which is harder than it sounds because the AIs in Stellaris can be quite aggressive ... in the first attempt at the achievement, AIs were attempting to attack even when their cause was hopeless because they had nowhere else to go.

That's how that game essentially ended, with my combined fleets taking on the AI Contingency which was attempting to sterilise the galaxy. Oh and it went a little further than that for one of the achievements :

I think that star was a little bit bigger than the Dyson Sphere my people had created to capture its output.
The latest game sees me playing the complete opposite, they're a bunch of murderbots called the OTHAN Core (Over The Hill Artificial Nexus) with that name reflecting how I was feeling on Saturday after lots of walking on Friday !

We're on the left there having worked our way through 3 competing races so far. The next war will be against the 4 neighbouring races who have joined up in a federation. The main disadvantage to playing as the Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm or in this case, Determined Exterminator, is that diplomacy is impossible and the other races will gang up in defence ... because they're scared.

Makes for challenging games.

I've also enjoyed finishing off the Battletech campaign. A curious game, they brought out the gameplay in the tabletop game but I wasn't convinced about the scenarios they put it in. It's like the difference between having a set of rules to play with and having a fun world to play in. I'm not sure that the Roguetech mod allows for that. It greatly expands the rules but doesn't do much about the world. I may well give it another shot, especially as I've given Avast the boot after thinking that it was hurting performance too much.

Lots of music has been happening too as I steadily work my way through the library again. There are less than 4000 tracks to go now until I've listened to everything ... and along the way more new music will appear. I have my eye on Jade Bird and Emiliana Torrini after hearing a couple of their tracks over the last few days.

I'm up to listening to the G albums now.

I have an episode of Titans on at the moment in another window. An interesting modern take on it, which I've been more intrigued about than enjoying perhaps. I'm wondering where it will be going.

I'm up to series 6 with Stargate SG-1, which I have more mixed feelings about. If you watch that after reading the British Stargate fanfic thing, the series is very much a dumpster fire in comparison. O'Neill is a decent character but .... he's also very often written as a bit of a prat. Stealing technology, the Red Sky episode where he allows impetuousness to override how he deals with the locals. It's a much loved series but I have reservations about it now.

I'll keep watching though. It was one of the best series on when it came out but ... is probably ageing a bit badly now.

Now though, I think it's a little bit of Skyrim !