I like all music by Senser but most of it just happens to play in a shuffle when driving. The first album by them Stacked Up is very hard to beat and because I’ve listened to that one for around thirty years the newer stuff just gets lost in brain-fog. That’s not to say it’s not worth listening to, I think I’m just saying that I’m an old dog and most new music is like new tricks [are?].
This is communication number 1945, here are some things that happened that year:
The US executes a US soldier for desertion.
Hildesheim is pretty much destroyed in an air raid.
Arthur C Clarke puts forward idea of geosynchronous satellite orbits.
Reading through the Wikipedia pages over the last few communications has been pretty fucking depressing. I know I’ve been trying to put things in these lists that are a little different. I don’t want to focus on the things that people probably know, I want to put things that you might read and go “huh?”. I’d like to think that the years following 1945 will be less depressing but I suspect that I’ll still be reading about plenty of murder and killing of people by governments around the world. Jesus, humans are fucking terrible and horrible most of the time.
I can’t remember how long I’ve been flying around the world in X-Plane. I know I started at RAF Valley in North Wales and I’m now in Oman. I almost decided to quit and head back to the UK just to see something other than desert. Maybe the views will get more interesting once I hit the Indian subcontinent? I’ve tried the terrain following radar and that seems to work quite well, I do suspect that at times the system gets into a System Induced Oscillation and I have to keep an eye on that while chucking it along at 600 knots and 200 feet. I could set the thing to go lower but I don’t know what the lead time is when heading into the hills.
I’ve been using both screens as a wide screen monitor and I’m impressed with the results. I’m getting 50FPS in the desert and at altitude which is good. Then, when over simple towns it doesn’t change much but over Kent the frame rate drops to around 24 which, if I’m being honest, is fine as far as I’m concerned. There are some strange ways that X-Plane behaves and the limit isn’t the graphics card it’s more likely the fact that the simulator only uses one core in the CPU.
I flew over the Alps from Saanan to somewhere close to Italy and on the way I popped up over the Matterhorn. This was me testing the new set up and frame rates in a complex, but basic in terms of human infrastructure, area of the world. I wanted to see how smooth the flight simulator felt and I will say that it worked perfectly. I could increase the framerate a little more if I used a different aircraft but why would anyone want to do that?
The Matterhorn, because it’s there
It’s not so easy to get the external pictures when using a widescreen set up but I think I managed it well. Not sure if I can get the widescreen look with an in-program snap shot but I could keep trying. I’m not sure if it would look good as a picture though.
Bombing Run – Oman
While heading over the desert in Oman I tried to get some shots of my bombs firing and I think I did well. I’m lucky that none of the detritus flying around destroyed my aircraft! That has happened many times when I’ve been flying too low and drop bombs in the past. I release the bombs and then the aircraft blows up and the world is suddenly quiet as the game ejects me from my fighter. Oh well!
Today, as I write this, it is the last day of August and I was hopeful that I would beat my previous communications per month total but this month is going to come in second as the most I’ve ever published is 68 in May 2013. There is very little chance of me beating that at any time in the future. It’s too much and I think I’ve become more snobby about the “content” on here and trying to increase the quality of the subjects that I write about. I doubt the actual words I write have improved, but then while learning a lot about language recently I do know that grammar and meanings are very fluid and maybe we shouldn’t shit on people so much for not being able to write good.
This is communication number 1944 and so here are some things that happened in that year of the common era:
521 choke to death after a train stalls in a tunnel in Italy.
The prohibition on married women working as teachers is lifted in the UK.
