rant – bikesbabesbytes

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Dear Star Trek, when your show’s intro talks about a mission to investigate new worlds and discover new civilisations you hardly expect the Enterprise to be… delivering engine parts to an outpost, dropping off power units to a station, on a routine supply mission, doing a routine survey, returning to a planet that the Captain himself had been to, some years before.

But these are the premises of 7/10 of the episodes of the new Star Trek SNG series. These don’t sound like missions involving strange new worlds or civilisations. Heck, most of these don’t even sound like tasks for a warship, let alone the Federation’s flagship (I’m fairly certain that the Enterprise is that, please correct me if I’m wrong). To be honest, I don’t know why you would send a fleet’s flagship to “explore strange new anything….”, the flagship’s job is to control the fleet, float about doing flag waving activities and be ready to pound anyone who wants to start something. Exploring is the job of the Comstar Explorer Corps (from the Battletech universe), not the ComGuards.

Now granted, strange, unexpected things do keep happening to the Enterprise on these “routine” missions. But it’s like the Battlestar Galactica remake (to bring a third franchise in to confuse dear reader), 4 series in and they’re still saying “…. and they have a plan.” Pretty sure their original plan didn’t have them following an escaped Battlestar and fleet across half the galaxy…

Anyway,(end rant) look, I’m not a Trekkie and to be honest, I haven’t really watched Star Trek consistently until the more recent movies (starring Chris Pine) and the newer series (I’ve watched Discovery, Picard and now Strange New Worlds). Why? Because I didn’t really enjoy the older ones, and I like the newer ones. I have seen TOS when it was on TV, probably reruns, and pretty confident I’ve seen all of the theatrical releases. But I’m not deep in the lore, and as I said, have seen only bits of the older series. I think, something around 20 episodes of TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager combined.

Strange New Worlds is pretty good, but I think both Picard and Discovery have better (in that the stories are wound along a longer narrative) than SNW does. It’s more in the classic (almost) everything is resolved by end credits, unlike the other two. I think I enjoy the former more. Which is probably why I didn’t really watch the older shows (like TNG and DS9).

So I’ll watch it, but I’m not hanging for the next episode. It’s a time filler for me.

Two disappointing holidays

I left my old job just before Christmas. Then my new one didn’t start until the term started. I had big hopes for that 5 weeks. I wanted to get out on a few rides, maybe camp somewhere, I was going to hit up the mountain bike trails every other day (and be back before the kids got up for breakfast). So big plans and I was really looking forward to filling my days with this stuff.

But it rained.

And rained.

I also ended up visiting a bunch of specialists for medical appointments.

And it rained more (and that was just a lead up for the rain during the school term!).

So by the time the holidays ended I really felt let down by the whole period. I almost wished I been at work that whole time.

But 10 weeks later, the school term finished. I knew I had a few admin things to finally separate from my employer (officially, I was still on long service leave until Easter, even though I was already working as a teacher). But that would be a few meetings, some emails and a couple of phone calls.

And then it wasn’t.

Many of the fun roads were closed around Sydney, suffering pot holes, washouts, landslips and more in the days and days of rain we’ve had. So not many options (and they closed one more during the holidays to fix some of it).

Then the Mrs and the youngest got COVID, so we were all locked down for the second week of the holidays.

The end of the second holiday period since I became a teacher and I really don’t feel like I’ve done anything I wanted to. No camping, no rides, no mountain bike (the trails are heavily affected by rain even when I wasn’t locked down). I didn’t even get to go browsing for new all weather riding gear (my current set is looking a bit tired, and is a lot less effective some 9 years later). Though that is not urgent. I will need to have something sorted by the MotoGP trip (October)

I really hope the July holidays are better. But then the days are shorter… the nights colder.

Just really frustrated by it all.

DnD – Is being a player boring?

Since I returned to D&D about a year ago, almost my entire experience has been as a Dungeon Master. This was a scary thought a year ago – that the only way I was going to get a go at this game was to “bite the bullet” and do the hard work, boring role of DM.

After a year, I enjoy the “work”, so it’s not work, it’s fun. And it’s not boring. I get to set up situations for my players. I read resources and imagine what my players might do in the situation, or how I can splice this interesting idea into the story we are playing. I get to draw maps (which satisfies part of my creative streak) to set them up for Roll 20 (at the moment).

Then in the game, I have to be several characters. I have to rearrange everything when the players do something I had not expected, either to go with them, or sneakily guide them back to the main story. I can play off their actions and build some humour, and threat into the scene.

Twelve months ago opening this book seemed scary and boring….

Yes, it’s busy, and yes, I can’t just rock up 5 minutes into the session and roll with it. But it’s not scary, and it’s not boring.

With COVID and a few other factors, I found myself helping a couple of my players help a new DM out. I think he’s DM’d before, but this was the first time he used Roll20 (and there was something else I had to learn at the start). Pretty slow, as expected, as we talked him through layers and tokens, dynamic lighting, rolling dice etc.

After that, the group has launched into Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

And, ummmm, I’m kinda bored.

Now, the DM is still learning Roll20 and seems to get bogged down in the details, but not always does this happen with just intricacies of Roll20.

I sit and wait my turn in combat. I listen in so I can play off the others and try to have my actions planned out before I have my turn. This keeps the game flowing, but I feel like I spend ages waiting for the others. Do all players feel like this?

I desperately want to know what’s around the next bend, but we’ve got to go slow so we don’t “illuminate” the bad guys (or move straight past them because they’re on a different layer) and ruin the surprise.

I’m starting think I don’t like being a player. Or at least a Roll20 player. Maybe I’d be less bored if we were all sitting around a table together?

Now, this group (apart from 1 other player) I’ve only just met, and only online. So there’s very little rapport built between us. That’s part of it, I’m sure.

Heck, maybe its just that it’s a dungeon crawl (well so far) and there’s no thing driving us? Maybe I’d like a more RP heavy adventure. Or at least a mystery or something?

But are there others out there that find being a Player boring, especially after being a DM for a while (or as a large part of your playing)?

Do you talk about it?

See the gorilla? Well the viewers didn’t.

As a motorcycle rider, it isn’t unusual to have near misses with cars. The more often you ride, the more you will have. Just the other day, barely 50m from my house I was forced to come to full emergency stop part way around a roundabout when a car coming from my left clearly hadn’t seen me and wasn’t going to stop.

Just as I pulled up, the driver saw me and also stopped. He gave an apologetic wave and I carried on.

I have to say, this one was kind of close. Worse, if it had been a minute or two earlier, my own daughter would have been standing at the bus stop just metres away and seen the crash, or at least the aftermath.

And it was my closest in several weeks. I pulled over a few metres up the road until I could catch my breath and the shakes slowed down a bit.

But that isn’t the point of the post.

Riders will always discuss this kind of event amongst themselves. It’s actually beneficial in that it provides a forum to examine the incident and learn from it. Even if we’re not doing it consciously, we’re still learning. Incidents like this years ago are part of the reason I was even looking for the car in the first place.

But what about the driver? Did he go to work and sit down with his mates and describe how he almost collected a motorcycle on the way to work?

I bet he didn’t. Does anyone? It’s a natural tendency to cover up our mistakes. Not let people know.

But there was more than just laziness at work for him. If he was a local, I would be confident he would know that my direction is the least used, so he’s assumed there would be no traffic. The mind is pretty amazing so even if he did look my way, his mind was not expecting to see anything and so he didn’t. These other factors are well understood in other circles (like in aviation). Google the gorilla suit in the basketball game for an extreme version of this “not seeing things”.

And so his learning will be less – and there is more chance he will do it again. Or that his friends who never have this discussion have more chance to have the same mistake.

So would you talk about it?

Christchurch

Every time I see news on this or read comments I get a bit choked up about it. I am not really sure why this one has affected me more than any other tragedy.

I have to say I think it’s because it’s New Zealand. While NZ is my homeland, I’ve lived away from it longer than I ever lived there. I’ve got no connections to Christchurch either. No family or friends, I’ve only been there twice for a couple of brief overnights.

I think it’s just because it’s NZ and that this kind of thing just doesn’t happen at home. I can’t make sense of it. I think it helps somewhat that the shooter was a foreigner and not a Kiwi. That would be even more dissociative for me.

I’ve been really proud of the PM and the example she’s set the world. But also the others I’ve seen in the news, even people like the Mongrel Mob and others who would normally be thought to be “outside” the community.

Anyway. I’m not really sure what’s going on but thanks for reading.

Car Drivers are …

I couldn’t think of the right adjective, maybe you can by the end of the story.

Yesterday I filtered to the front of a LONG line of traffic to find a guy trying to push his car across an intersection (this street was really busy, but everyone was turning left or right, straight ahead was quiet and a good place to option for the broken car). He was at the head of the queue, holding all these people up.

I thought I could help out, so pulled in behind him and hopped off the bike. A pedestrian crossing in front jumped in behind as well. As we did another filtering bike turned up and hopped off to help. with the 4 of us, this was an easy job. Actually on flat, pushing a car is pretty easy, its trying to steer/brake as well as pushing that becomes awkward.

So the lights turned green and we pushed off. About halfway we started to yell at the driver, who was pushing from the drivers door, to hop in the car so he could steer and brake. Caused a scary moment as he almost tripped getting in, but he was in and the car pushed across.

We headed back to our bikes just as the light went red, so it was perfectly timed. This meant we had the whole red cycle to get back on. In my case this meant taking off my gloves to fish in my pockets as I couldn’t remember which had my keys.

Not a single car driver moved, the whole time, to help this guy. I don’t know how long he had been there, but the queue behind him was pretty long. As riders, and the pedestrian who was crossing the street, this stuck car would never have held us up. Wasn’t in our way at all. But we all decided to help out. The car drivers, half of whom (there were two lanes turning right, the car was in one of these) were stuck behind him and basically couldn’t move until the broken car was moved….

They just sat there.

Car drivers are….

WoW – Stayin Alive!

NOT!

OMG, I died about 6 or 8 times tonight. Any group larger than 3 and I’m throwing my life (and repair gold) away. These quests are killing me, literally. For example, I have to kill a large worm in a cavern (up on Frost??? Ridge) and it has about 4 adds around it. Nope.

Then there’s this guy that I didn’t even attempt. He’s only 1 level above me, but there are 6 adds in the vicinity and a wandering three that may get involve. And he probably hits like a brick on his own…

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So I’m getting a bit sick of dying. It’s almost like the bad old days when I first launched into Burning Crusade.

Now I know my gear isn’t great. I reckon I need to relearn more about my rotation. Those will help. Also, don’t run back into the fight when you’re suffering res sickness, there’s an old tip I had forgotten.

On the plus side I’ve actually used my Hex spell a few times. It helps. A little.

Expecting the worst

My commute home has a long stretch where they are making the two way road into a dual lane divided road (and they’ll probably reduce the speed limit). Most of it is done now, and its pretty sweet, with several lights for me to filter through.

The patch where it’s not complete has become a bottleneck though, and even though I’m heading the opposite way to most commuters, the traffic can back up a bit (though nothing like what the people headed the other way have to deal with).

Last night I was coming up to this part when another rider caught and then passed me. He caught up to the cars ahead and sat quite close behind, much less than my several bike lengths. Just as he did, the cars in front had some random (I couldn’t see why) reason to slow a lot, quite suddenly. But there was a moment that he had to brake hard as well, as I slowed. I had a heart in mouth moment that I was about to see him run into the back of the cars. It was pretty close, with him swerving towards the other lane as well.

The cars slowed like this a couple of times, as the other rider continued to sit off the back of the last car.

Expecting the worst at any moment I was slowly increasing my gap to this lot.

At this point the road became dual lane for a short period. The cars at the back who had also been frustrated at whatever the car in front had been doing, shot out into the new lane and along with the bike were racing for the merge.

Initially I did too.

But very quickly I could see that the bike was going to be stuck in the middle of a bunch of cars trying to merge before they hit some concrete walls and if I continued as I was going I would be in the middle of that too. I back off several car lengths to let them all sort it out.

One car almost merged right on top of the bike, he gave a wave, the usual SMIDSY.

It was extremely close from my POV, and looking at it, that car drove through where I would likely been riding too. Still expecting the worst.

It all cleared up shortly after, but I was astounded that the other rider continued to ride on the rear bumper of the cars, even after two near misses in less than a kilometre.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised…. the Nike shoes he wore looked expensive, but matched nicely with the red Ducati 999s….

We don’t like it when cars tailgate us…. why do some of us do it to them??