A quiet week

Yes, mostly been a quiet week - lots of lazing about and early nights. Let's see, what did I do..

Worked quite hard (in work) and got lots done, as usual. Lots of slides made, samples processed and I also finally finished my Official Photography Unit Guides to Using a Nikon D90. Apart from thinking up a snappy title, that is.

Wednesday saw a brief visit to Jane's pad where Lucas insisted on throwing himself on top of me quite a bit. He's only little but he's absolutely solid, it's mad. Just so heavy and strong. We had a bit of Peroni and cake and watched Masterchef and I caught her a goth pokemon on.. well, Pokemon.

Friday night I did a bit of EVE - we were trying to play with a corp who seemed very similar to us so we wanted to get them to attack us and have a bit of a scrap. Sadly they refused to co-operate. I was about 90% certain they had cloaky eyes on us anyway so there wasn't any real hope of surprising them. I also patched up some old games I hadn't played for a while with the intent of giving them a go. These are League of Legends and Battleforge (more on these later).

Yesterday (which was Saturday) saw a trip to the park. Lucas had a bear to look after so it seemed vital to take him on an adventure. The bear was named Dewi and I mispronounced it virtually without fail. Glebelands is a nice little spot and it meant Lucas could look at some trains and his potential future school. He also got the opportunity to completely snub another child.

Here he is, having spotted something of import:

And here he sits as King of the Glebelands. He wasn't too happy about Dewi sharing his throne:

So, League of Legends, eh? It's a sort of MMO based around a gameplay mod for Warcraft 3 which was a tower defence sort of thing. In it, you have uncontrollable allies and enemies constantly spawning and attacking the enemy base and you support them by controlling a hero character with special abilities. In the normal mode of LoL you have this sort of line-up:

From which you can see a good bit of the appeal of the game - it's got a brilliant art style. I've been switching between a few of the 'recommended' novice characters such as Annie:

She's a sort of evil child who uses powerful magicks to blast people apart and also summons a massive monstrous bear to kill people with. She says things like, "Have you seen my bear Tibbers?"

Look at her skip along:

There is also a wolfman thing called Warwick who gets health from attacking people and has a really nasty dps cooldown you can use to quickly take out enemy players:

He says things like, "It's only fun when they run". He's got an ability which increases his speed if he detects a nearby player with low health so you can peg it across and nuke them.

Also there is Tristana who says things like, "C'maaaaan, let's shoot something". She's got some really nifty utility things. Also: a bazooka.

A typical game involves 10 people and goes on for about 30-40 minutes. The consequence of this is that it generates some really spectacular emo rage when anything goes a bit wrong. One match yesterday had someone constantly saying things like, "OMG I'M ON TEAM RETARD!!". I like the game though so I just ignore them.

You have a persistant character which levels up and you can spend points you accrue to unlock new heroes to use and so on but I've already got quite a few and not played that many of them yet.

Battleforge is a sort of card-based RTS style of thing but I've not got around to trying that again just yet. Maybe I will do in a bit and then take some photos.

Umm.. I'm a bit low on books I want to read now as well and there's not many telly shows either. Limmy's Show has now finished. Down the Line is back on but that's radio and also only 30 minutes a week and I can't quite get into Masterchef this time around.

So this means: GAMES.

In case you were wondering, the preceeding post represents a new wormhole system naming scheme that is being designed by one of our corp members. Just needed somewhere to host it and flickr was playing silly buggers so dumped it onto here.

Doctor Fact

Oh, that was the other book I read: Sick Notes. It's a series of sort of commentaries from a GP, talking about his patients and the mad red tape and all that sort of thing. Quite interesting on the whole but doesn't quite hang together as a complete book - there's a few specific stories on patients that he returns to a couple of times and you're left wanting to know a bit more about how it all turned out.

I suppose it reflects the reality though - ie; once a patient has died or been terminally hospitalised then the GP probably will never hear another thing about them.

So, yesterday. Bit of EVE really, spent most of the evening doing scanning for the rest of the corp and then a bit of moneymaking. Nothing terribly exciting, though we did have a wormhole to our site-running system that came from nullsec (player-owned space) and those people can be a bit nasty. We did a skillful controlled closing of the hole though and I also think we trapped one of their covert ops pilots in system. He'll have a fun job getting back home.

Lesson to known-space people: stay out of wormhole space, we know what we're doing.

Chaos this morning, Cardiff Central had Gone Dark. No power at all so no trains, I had to get a bus. Three times as long it took and smaller seats. Not fair.

LF TANK

Last radio show for a little while at least. It wasn't a bad one but I do feel a lot more relaxed now that I won't be compelled to watch bad films. Today's one was You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Some Woody Allen pointlessness. Not terrible, just unconvincing and average.

For something else to do I've been bumming around on World of Tanks open beta. Seems like a good one to jump in and out of. I'm rubbish with normal tanks but this one is working well for me:

It's some sort of Russian self-propelled gun. Apparently it was blueprinted but never actually built. I just find myself a nice high spot, let other people do some scouting and then rain fire on the enemies. Fun fun.

It generally looks cool too, like this other Russian tank I bought:

It's got sort of talent trees to do upgrades for your tanks - you can choose whether to upgrade guns, engines, etc. Assuming it stays Free to Play I'll probably pick it up when it's released properly.

I do also have Rift now as well, finally patched up to date so I'll be having a try of that tomorrow.

Oh, I forgot to do pics of my current Pokemon lineup. Probably just as well as they've let me down at the moment. 5th gym leader is kicking my arse.

The week in pictures and some words

I can't already be slacking on updating this. I'll try to summarise the events of the past week but I've probably forgotten some due to being a bit tired.

Well, the corp meeting on Sunday went ahead and it was basically decided to leave the Alliance. The other corp we're with are mostly fine there's just two people who are utter arseholes who nobody else can get along with. I did nearly get into an argument with one of them - wrote a post on the corp forums using phrases like, "woefully under-socialised" and "temperament of a wife beater" but saw sense and didn't post it.

So the people who had moved up and joined their corp managed to sneak their expensive ships back out and come back with us. When we announced that none of our people are able to tolerate them there was a bit of drama so now we'll just see what happens. I imagine the Alliance will be broken but I'm happy with that outcome.

New plans for us involve moving up to a higher class of wormhole system and running a fresh apprenticeship to bolster the US Time Zone numbers.

Monday: went to doctors to restart my antidepressants. I'd done a trial period of staying off them but that didn't work very well. It's only a small dose but it seems to be just enough to keep me ticking over sensibly. So that meant a late start but still got loads of work done. Popped to the pub after work to read a book and got chatting to a pair of comedians. I don't mean that in a disparaging sense - they really were comedians. They were pleasant enough.

The book I'm reading at the moment is Forgotten Voices: D-Day. It's a collected set of diary entries and personal recollections that tell the story of the events of D-Day. Very, very interesting to see how it all went on and lots of funny little passages. They've just got to the part where the gliders have landed and are trying to secure the flanks ahead of the main seaborne invasion. One of the people who escaped from a crashed glider into a flooded area said he was keeping up the fine traditions of the British army by making tea - all the teabags he had sewn into his uniform were leaving a stream of tea behind him as he walked.

Bit of a blank for the rest of the week, something may come to mind though. I had been doing some Pokemonning and bought the guide book. Never played the games before so was sure I was missing out on all sorts of basic stuff. I got a new evolution:

I don't like it much and I don't use him any more. I'll post my present lineup later.

Mostly the week was just work though. I did notice that the trend towards scientific talks with zany names is still ongoing:

'Making a case for it'. Oh, you guys.

Still a bit tired so can't think of a huge amount else. Friday I had some burgers. Oh, and on Friday we received a security alert saying a big animal rights protest was happening at the uni. I went to take some pictures of them, expecting them to be quite interesting. The protest was.. not well attended:

Yes, that's all of them. I haven't just framed it to make it look weak. Four. Four people. And, ahem:

You know that company is a big customer of Huntington Life Sciences, right? Tch.

When I got back I went to a bbq which had some nice food and sat about taking the piss out of Dinocroc vs Supergator but the fun had to come to an end due to rugby. Did some EVE and took some pictures of the Supermoon but they were mostly crap due to the sky being very hazy. I quite liked this one though:

YES

An update will definitely be inbound when I get home.

Hmm, that makes it sound like something particularly remarkable has happened. It hasn't, it just occurred to me that I haven't updated but do have pictures to post. So yes. That's all.