Outside Context and Spaceships and Boats

What's been happening since last time ?

Can't believe I didn't say anything about the Le Mans weekend the other week. It was a decent race again this time, although the overall winner hasn't been in doubt much for a few years now. The Toyota's pretty much walked away with it although they did have their scares throughout the race. It was a shame that the Aston Martins got hit with a Balance of Performance nerfbat (slight reduction in horsepower and fuel capacity) but their latest car hasn't been particularly good lately anyway.

Oh ... if I'm never seen from again :

I for one welcome our new green glowy overlords.

Elite has been a little grindy at the moment .... but that's partly intentional and there's an objective to it (getting stuff to modify the ships). Another phase in the game and actual progress in getting stuff for a rather long shopping list and seeing curious places.

That's Site 426, happily pictured with the sun up this time. The Elite universe can be really harsh. In this case, the workers at this manufacturing site had a rebellion, took charge and ... in something between normal and verging more on Warhammer 40k Dark, were brutally put down. (Link for more). What this means for the player is an abandoned settlement with plenty of goodies around the place for looting.

And back to the mothership sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD afterwards for tea as well. This one may have been named in an unfortunate caps lock incident. Oops ...

Another site is the crashed ship, Bug Killer. This isn't my ship ... honest. I did manage to crash the buggy though but forgot to take a screenshot of the upside down buggy.

I have regrets.

Perhaps not as much as this fella though ... I have his escape pod and may well be selling him to the highest bidder turning it in to the search and rescue people.

I watched a fair bit of the Nurburgring 24 hour race as well last weekend. This one is run over the Nordschliffe course, which is much longer distance than the Le Mans track, taking about 8 and a half minutes for the fastest cars to do a lap. A curious race. It's a bit more chaotic than most other races, with course vehicles going around the track as they recover stricken vehicles. It was actually getting quite dangerous towards the fall of darkness and I actually stopped watching for a while.

And then tuned in again later to see how the Lexus cars were doing. Looks like they had problems. The 19 and 20 cars, both RCFs, tripped up over each other during the early stages of the race which took them out of contention. There was also a Lexus LC race car there which I was urging on as it too was recovering from earlier issues.

(The RC F is a race car variant of my IS. Same basic chassis, a coupe body shell and the hybrid bits are replaced with a chunky 5 litre V8).

It's nice to have an underdog team to cheer on and the RCs have been doing well in the American IMSA series too. Hopefully the next Aston Martin car becomes quick enough to win races too.

Outside of that, loads of work stuff has been happening which I can't talk about here. But it does mean I get out of the office, see interesting things, figure out what they do and what they're capable of and carry the lessons back to feed into the next steps of what we're doing.

It's fascinating to see the differences coming in between theoretical performance of equipment and what happens when that kit is put into the real world. Is there a suitable analogy ? Maybe 2 laptops ago, where I had one that couldn't keep its cool. It was advertised as a 2GHz laptop but when you asked it to do work, it would overheat and downgrade itself to 800MHz. So it could run itself at the top speed but when you needed performance (even just telly programme streaming), you'd actually own a much worse laptop.

I may also have had a day trip up to Gloucester last week (got caught in nasty traffic on the way back - oops). I saw boats ....

Oh and big long poles by boats. But also boats.

Quite lovely boats actually but this one was the most gorgeous of them all :

That's the Isabella and she was looking amazing last week. A really pretty Dutch Barge.

Want one :-).