Mining, Reading, Working

Hello everyone,

What have I been up to for the week ? Feels like time is flying by still at the moment.

I've actually turned the Seti sums back on again, because it's cooled down enough here to be putting the jumpers back on.

Let's see. Work's been fairly intense lately and it really should have been a bit more intense. I should actually be in a different country at the moment under quarantine ahead of a little period away. But I'm not, partly due to physical condition, partly due to mental condition.

My head's ok now, my mental state picked up considerably after I was stood down from going away. But there is that nagging sense that I've let the mental issues win this time. Some of those issues come from the frustration I was having with arranging my end of the trip. (Arranging for me seemed to be much more of an unknown than the other people - can't go in to why here) A big one was the prospect of over a month away from home. I get anxiety when I'm away. Some of it was the conditions I'd be going into. Again, can't say why here.

What caused the decision to be made though was that the mental issues were causing tensions that were manifesting in physical conditions. My back has mostly repaired itself now from when it tried to decouple itself and I've been back in the internet spaceship piloting seat as well (more later). Mining has been a good activity there, feels productive. I haven't attempted a shooter or MMO style game for a good while though, if the spaceships are close to aggravating the wrist, then the shooter / MMO games are likely to activate that issue again.

Oh and I also needed to take a moment when I was picking up shopping last week and my hips were  getting crunchy ...

Things do feel a little like making excuses though and I'm not sure if I like that. That's one thing about mental issues, the person with them will feel as if they've let themselves down ... which just acts as negative reinforcement.

It's ok to talk about the mental issues. In fact, I'd heavily encourage it. In being able to express those issues with a few people, it's let me bounce back quite a bit from when they were affecting me so much that the tension was manifesting as the physical issues.

Reading ?

After abandoning David Brin's Existence after 100 tedious pages, I've been reading A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher. More to come about that in a later post (when I've finished reading it !) but I enjoyed its first 36 pages so much, I had to share part of why I was finding it a fun read :

It's been light hearted fun so far, very readable and the early parts quite happily drew me in to the story and I was wanting to continue despite it getting late.

Existence was a bit different. The first couple of chapters were ok ... and then we hit one with a travel journalist experiencing the Mixed Reality rich areas. That was tough to read, not for subject but for readability. I don't like the Wall of Text tendency that I can have, this was Wall of Text to the extreme. And then it goes into intermission sections between chapters, some of which were a talk show type set up that I was essentially just skipping over. There's a lot of self indulgent stuff in there, it was distracting heavily away from any semblance of plot and I gave up on it after 100 pages, perhaps 15/20 of which felt plot related.

Internet spaceships ? I've been mining again ...

Mining is a bit broken though, so fairly soon I'll be switching ship again. ZoomNarr is potentially next, although I'd like to open up a little more engineering first for weight savings ...

That'll be what Zoomnarr looks like and I'll be aiming at around 3 hours to get to the Galactic Core in this one. My record is 3 hours 6 minutes ...

I'm not switching ships due to a lithobraking incident though ... honest. (All the dents came out from this planetary approach).

Gotta say, the colour scheme of Hand of Caledorn was fitting in rather nicely with the surroundings she was mining in. However, mining has suffered a little lately in the metagame area. Low Temperature Diamonds were the main highly lucrative item, these are now scarcer than scarce. As a knock on to that, the Painite I've been mining has lessened in value as the market saturates. So ... time to test something new :

Mining with explosives ! Charges set ...

BOOM TODAY ! (Well. Yesterday.)

Hmm. More boom needed.

That's better. The idea is that you use the seismic charge launcher to embed explosives into the rock and then ...

Pick up the goodies exposed from the insides, find the high buyers and profit. I cut the session short a little because I was struggling to fill the hold ... and also because the wrist issues were threatening again. Still, it was a nice 128m credits from the session although that took 4 hours to get, rather than the 2 hours that a Painite session currently netting 121m would take.

So I think I'll leave the mining aside for a little bit. Next up will be a brief combat session again in a Mamba. Not the best ship but the only useful role I can see for it is mining. A Beluga Passenger Liner will happen at some point ... and also the Anaconda class explorer ship Searching For Dragons will go round the galaxy. That'll be all of the ships owned at the that point, although the Admiral Luperza hasn't been out of the hangar yet.

We'll see. Perhaps even a little FFXIV as well, although that was a catalyst for the wrist issues so I may have to just cold turkey drop that game.

We shall see ! Apart from that, Le Mans is coming up, having been moved to September. Nurburgring 24 hour is the week after. I'll be watching someone down the field and hoping they do well. It's boring to support the winners. Better to urge on the cars that have had terrible luck at some point and you can watch them battle back through the field after repairs. I was doing that with the Lexus cars last year, sadly they won't be at the Nurburgring even this year. But there's a custom sports car, several GT86s and some Aston Martins to keep an eye on.

Should be good.

Stay safe everyone, be well.