Riding the wave of puberty
An old fart was remembering himself at fifteen, when I was on the last year of elementary school: this view we nerds mocked with whenever subjected to a family computer running the latest from the foul B. Gates and his company. Just like with ie where your only task was to download a proper browser, the first thing with Win95 you wanted to exit it to do something, anything.
Some things haven't changed in these decades, my loathing of Windows has remained strong :D Project Mumblings and its Finnish-speaking sibling haven't been quite as annoying as I was at the same age, at least I hoped my verbal output has improved a tiny bit during their 15 years.
A rarity these days: Panzerkampfwagen
The semi-accidentally bought Panzer IV Ausf. F2 by Border Model was a really nice set, and like I praised them while working with them, the Panzerwerk Design tracks were great and I wanted more for my next tank. As soon as I figured out what that was going to be, got one bought, and started assembling.
Lego
The Bumblebee got bought primarily because I wanted to do my part to ensure more Transformers lego sets in the future, not really because of the character itself. Still, the set was fun and supported my childhood memories, and this was about a quadrillion times more cool than the flea market -found and equipmentless G1 Bumblebee.
Last Autumn's father's day arrived with more buildables. Executor was also glorious, and actually fit somewhere, unlike the large ISD that was waiting for space and time inside its box.
Fresher stuff, Soundwave was orderable on 1.8., and as it was known, I ordered it the very morning. I could've started my first post-vacation morning a lot worse. That, of course, didn't make the waiting any easier or nicer. Luckily Soundwave was delivered right at the end of my second workday so I could start that evening already.
Rocket launcher diorama
As anyone knew, I hadn't made practically any dioramas. Generally speaking I had no materials, tools, nor even ideas - not to mention space - for making display things for my constructs. Maybe the airplane stands like Focke-Wulff's grass field with a Kübelwagen, the Fulcrum's much-suffered Soviet concrete base, or the Flanker's flight stand could be called vignettes, even if the difference between the two was a bit funky. This setup was the first one in ages that felt that it would justify a somehow fancier title.
Urged on by my colleagues I started on it, but I had to admit I didn't really need much poking to get going. My absolute amateur skillset glared a viewer from here and there, but the main thing was that I had a good time and I was generally quite pleased with the time-consuming thing.
Mechs
Last rolling year had been nicely loaded with plastic 'Mechs. Five different sets, fifteen minis from scratch, and five with a repaint of cockpit panels, energy weapon lenses, and Jump Jets.
Ghost Bear
Two final Points for the Star from Delta Galaxy, a Stormcrow and a Viper:
Jade Falcon
Retouching the Operation:REVIVAL Star, meaning Executor, Puma, Timber Wolf, Nova, and Mongrel. This improved my somehow annoying day by a factor of craploads.
Blood Spirit
Funnily enough I forgot to take a final group photo of the Star that was for the Clan that turned the practical opposite of the so-called espirit de corps. Clan Blood Spirit, Alpha Galaxy, unspecified Cluster, Trinary, and Star: Mist Lynx, Kit Fox, Stormcrow, Ice Ferret, Shadow Cat.
Jade Wolf
Some Second Line ClanTech BattleMechs for a very short-lived Clan [in an inverted N-pattern from rear left to front right]: Marauder IIC, Warhammer IIC, Stone Rhino, Hunchback IIC, Supernova.
Queue
In addition to the digital stuff I also had a couple of bits in the Clan Invasion box, and then all that came in the awfully-long-awaited Mercenaries KS loot. Nope, I was not going to run out of BT stuff in the backlog, which meant that at my rate of painting there could be stuff for a couple of years. The previous ones have been in slow progress over some years, so the assumption was indeed years.
BTTracker
I have been randomly and casually improving my tracker, at least whenever I noticed that some earlier solution turned out to be too clunky. Not that it interested anyone else in the known universe, but I was thinking of posting about it at some point anyway. That one made my hobby life easier and that pleased me, even if a smarter and so much more time-efficient approach would've been a super simple UI and a db model.
Air farce
This I have said often, that I have never been that much into planes, especially anything more modern than a Me-262. Still, I was beside myself when Santa brought me an F-15 and I even managed to start on it before the following Saturnalia! In the name of science it might be fun to get the other two F-15 models from different manufacturers just to compare them.
Games
Since the last anniversary post my Steam Deck has been graced by the Doom set (having bought the original at some point I got an autoupdate to DOOM + DOOM II which then also included Final Doom, Master Levels, Sigil and couple of others) from start to finish; I played through the Duke Nukem 3d's four episodes, of which the last was completely new to me; some more Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries that got somehow stuck with my mod setup and I just uninstalled the damn thing in annoyance; then I returned to Factorio v2 in the late winter.
For some unexplicable reason I started working on the Lazy Bastart achievement in Factorio, which meant I could only build a minimum amount (<= 111 entities) of anything by hand, and everything else had to be done with assemblers. This time I started with a Main Bus straight away (8 for metal plates, 8 for copper plates, 2 for steel beams, 1 rock/brick, 1 coal, 4 green circuits, 4 reserved for upcoming products) that also took a bit of extra time because I had to tweak and poke around constantly, but at least it kept the spaghetti at bay. Unless you looked at the smelting area I built into a bit too tight a spot for extensions, which I refactored into tidy input-output lines took the evenings of a week.
My slow tinkering then kicked me in the shins when my sisteen smelting lines with roboti arms, and their neighbouring 20 centrifuges choked my six steam engine parks. I had to do some emergency extensions until my factory had the four nuclear reactors and their accompanying bits constructed for me, which then moved my energy worries to a more distant future. The beauty of this kind of planned automation was that even if it took a while, even the resource-intense things got built while you did something else. In this very practical case the fission reactors, heat exchangers, and turbines had been ready for a while and I didn't need to start building them when I finally I knew I needed them.
Pretty soon after that I noticed how my 24-lane Main Bus was too narrow after all and I needed four more lanes (2 red circuits, 1 blue CPU, 1 sulphur) and I tried to get the liquid pipes also somewhere so I could move the lubricant to the CPU subfactory and the electric motor factory on the opposite side. The next time I'd start with even more pre-planning and at least eight lanes more to start with a round 32 width.
Despite all this silliness I got my rocket factory started and had them launch rockets with satellites at a calm pace, after assembling only 103 items myself. In comparison to a normal game the early part was noticeably slow and hand-holdy, because I had to carry materials back and forth and change the recipes of my few Assemblers until my setup had reached the critical mass and I could just collect the technomechanical fruits from the containers.
Cyberpunk 2077 had fallen off my interest list because I simply didn't care for one-expression Reeves' prominent presence. The ~5 years of reading/hearing people's praise of the game, Steam Deck support and new big updates got me over my grumpiness and I bought the Ultimate Edition from some Spring Sale.
Creating a character took just about all of my playtime for my first gaming session, as these things tended to go, and I wasn't in a rush in this new world. I chose Nomad as the background, jumped into the First Act which was a long intro to the game. It took me over a week, about 10h, and then I stepped into the actually open world. The last time I played anything similar was Fallout 4 (311,5h for a single but pretty thorough playthrough about nine years ago), so I didn't have much to compare to.
By the midsummer week I had continued the main story only by meeting that one dude in a café, then I did what I always did in RPGs: side quests, subside quests, minor quets, look a squirrel! until there's nothing until the big story has been kicked a step forward. One evening I was greeted by an achievement pop-up: street cred capped, and I hadn't even paid any attention to it yet. So far I had done all the tasks in the Center, and continued southward to Heywood where I moved a bit further to Pacifica and even Westbrook to just solve things and simply drive around.
By the summer vacation in June I had spent a silly amount of time just running around, solving mysteries, and I still hadn't progressed in the story. Had I even been near the fence I was supposed to lean on to meet the guy? Doubtful.
Between the vacation and today's Project Mumblings birthday I completely cleaned up Westbrook, Watson, Santo Domingo, Heywood, and Badlands of gigs and NCPD tasks. I even spent a moment with Takemura at some point, and then left him to wait for a better moment again. Last weekend, having done everything else I practically found on the map, I started some mission chains for both Judy and Panam. No idea where those were headed yet.
My Doom story generator and the pygame proejcts have been on hold for a bunch of years now, even though I did poke my generator's texts at some point. Nothing to warrant sharing, though. Maybe I should just sit down and go through all the sentence constructors and then continue on to something more exciting or silly.
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