I’ve been playing Stray on the PS5 recently with guidance from Legend and it’s been really enjoyable. A Lovely story with a completely believable world. The detail was amazing and I’m looking forward to exploring the game some more, there are a few trophies I’d like to get.
I have spoken before on here about how lucky I feel I am to live in the Medway Valley Villages. Nestled between two large conurbations these villages have a country feel with the convenience of town living. We also have large skies and here are two photographs not that far apart in time show the glorious colours of our atmosphere.
It’s been a while since my last update to the list of airports and countries I have visited as part of my around the world flight in short hops. I can now confirm that I have reached all seven continents and am about to start making my way back home to the UK. There are some other communications from the first part to the second. So, here are the places I have been since the last communication and since updating X-Plane a short while ago.
Klyuchi Air Base Airport, Russia Adak Airport, Alaska, U.S.A. Lihue Airport, Hawaii, U.S.A. Pacific Missile Range Facility, Hawaii, U.S.A. Wheeler Army Airfield, Hawaii, U.S.A. Kahului Airport, Hawaii, U.S.A. San Francisco International Airport, California, U.S.A. Monterey Regional Airport, California, U.S.A. San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport, California, U.S.A. Santa Barbara Airport, California, U.S.A. Naval Outlying Landing Field Imperial Beach, California, U.S.A. San Felipe International Airport, Mexico Loreto International Airport, Mexico La Paz International Airport- Manuel Márquez de León, Mexico Los Cabos International Airport, Mexico Mazatlán International Airport, Mexico Tepic International Airport, Mexico Lázaro Cárdenas Airport, Mexico Chilpancingo National Airport, Mexico Puerto Escondido International Airport, Mexico Commercial Cd Ixtepec Airport, Mexico Ángel Albino Corzo International Airport, Mexico Toncontín Airport, Honduras Juan Santamaría International Airport, Costa Rica Enrique Malek International Airport (DAV), Panama Ruben Cantu Airport, Panama Tocumen International Airport, Panama Enrique Adolfo Jiménez International Airport (ONX), Panama Airport Antonio Roldan Betancur, Colombia Olaya Herrera Airport, Colombia Aeropuerto Antonio Narino, Colombia Aeropuerto Mariscal La Mar, Ecuador FAP Captain José Abelardo Quiñones González International Airport, Peru Jorge Chavez International Airport, Peru Aerodromo Maria Reiche, Peru Juan Simons Vela Airport, Peru Juan Mendoza Airport, Bolivia Diego Aracena International Airport, Chile San Pedro de Atacama Aerodrome SCPE, Chile Las Breas Airport, Chile Aeropuerto de Fiambalá, Chile Aeropuerto Internacional Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – San Juan, Argentina Santo Domingo Airfield, Chile Mocha Island airport, Chile Melinka Airport, Chile Caleta Blanco Airport, Chile Drummond Twins International Airport, Chile Porvenir Airport, Chile Almirante Schroeders Airport, Chile Ushuaia Airport (USH), Argentina Guardiamarina Zanartu Airport, Chile – moved to X-Plane 12 O’Higgins Skiway, Antarctica RAF Mount Pleasant, Falkland Islands, UK
Boeing 737-800 Antarctic Ocean
So, that’s all the continents completed. Now to head up the east coast of South America, North America and then home to good old Great Britain – not so great these days!
I’ve spent time jumping on and off of Twitter over the last little while. I’m fascinated to try and find out what’s going on with the world and this country but it all horrifies me so totally I have decided to try and ignore it. I can’t do much about any of the utter desperation and shit that this country is being put through by the last twelve years of tory rule, so I’ve decided to try to make sure I can look after myself and those I care about. If you are watching the news over the recent weeks following the utter thickness bullshit of a PM and you still choose to vote tory then you are a dick.
We shouldn’t be raising interest rates to stop inflation. The inflation isn’t caused by people spending money. It’s caused by energy shortages and greedy corporations. Raising interest rates will harm the poorest and those who have no money to spend. Funny that a tory government gave the Bank Of England the power to control interest rates along with the duty to control inflation because then all the blame goes onto the BoE.
We shouldn’t be taxing rich people less to “encourage growth”. We should be taxing rich people more and passing that to those who are struggling. We shouldn’t be borrowing money to give direct to the privatised companies to subsidise energy bills. We should be taxing those companies to give money to the poor. The money being borrowed is going to be paid back by tax payers in the future. So we are taking money from tax payers in the future to subsidise the profits of companies and shareholders. This is a classic tory move.
Also, most of our energy companies are owned by foreign states. France, Germany and The Netherlands own most of our energy companies via their STATE OWNED energy companies. Fuck this government and the tories of the 80s for selling off utilities owned by the people. What an utter failure of an experiment this style of capitalism has been.
We can wait until the next general election and we can vote for whichever candidate has the best possibility of kicking out the incumbent tory. This is the fucking least we can do. The experiments in greed that have been running since the 80s both here and in the USA have failed utterly. We need a tightly regulated capitalism, we need state owned utilities. We need state owned mass transit. If, after the next general election there is a single tory MP then I will be ashamed of this country [more than I currently am].
Personally I think we are due a revolution. A change. A republic. New rules. New systems. A style of government that thinks about the future and the poor. Perhaps we have universal basic income? Perhaps we move away from individual transit to mass transit. Perhaps we move to sustainable high density housing. We need to change the world and we can do that by being trailblazers in a world that will survive. Let’s be clear, our current systems are going to cause pain and death and wars in less than 50 years.
The problem is that this country is full of people too tied to the rules. Just look at the fawning over the royal family when the queen died. What a fucking disgrace. Such reverence being paid to an institution built on greed, slavery and theft. The power came from enslaving other countries and stealing their preciousness. It’s hard to explain this to people because they don’t want to listen. We can’t discuss these things because the entire state is build around the Crown. We’ve been like this for over a thousand years. Fuck this country.
So, vote the fuckers out.
Although I’d prefer to be in the streets shouting “viva la revolution”.
This is a monster album. Known also as Whitesnake ’87 this album smashed it. It’s excellent. I can even tolerate the ballads. For a long time I did not know Whitesnake was a British band, they were formed in London. It turns out this album was produced with many arguments and much strife. This created a masterpiece.
I went on a day trip the other day to RAF Brize Norton. This place is the airport for the British military and there’s a lot going on. The best bit was being shown around the actual C17 that took the dead queen from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt.
Feeling Mean – Might Post
So, not much to write here but plenty to see so here are a few of the photographs I took that day:
View From The Sun Roof – C17
A Good Undercarriage Picture
A Very Powerful Blower
Cheeky Italian Number
It’s hard to write stuff when it feels as though the whole country has gone mad. I am, broadly, terrified at the prospect of what the next few years will do with the utter shit we have in leadership. I don’t think I can write down just how much I hate the tories and everything they’ve done to destroy this country over the last twelve years. They are such a bunch of empathy lacking cunts that I fail to be surprised anymore at the levels of sheer shittery they are willing to throw around at the poor and yet enrich themselves. Viva la revolution!
On Friday I was chatting to the Legend and I said I wouldn’t buy X-Plane 12 because XP 11 is pretty good and most of my payware might not transfer over. Well, it took all of about 12 hours to change my mind and buy X-Plane 12 even though it’s the development product. It took a while to download because I got the scenery for the whole world – why wouldn’t you!
I had to set up the joystick and configure the keys so they work as I like. This didn’t take a massive amount of time but it’s frustrating when all you want to do is fly around and see the world.
Citation X in the Andes
The scenery is amazing. I have turned most graphics settings up to maximum and this works well with my RTX graphics card. I’m getting >20fps which for a flight simulator, especially X-Plane, is pretty darn good. Also, using the taskmaster I can see that the GPU is being used at around 90% and this pleases me. It’s worth having something you’ve paid for working as it should.
Citation X in the Andes
I’ve added in some of my custom scenery and it seems to be working well. So, I have my airport in Keswick, which doesn’t exist in reality but it does mean I’m in the Lake District immediately and can fly around and bomb shit.
F-14D in the Lake District
Now all I have to do is continue my flight around the world and get back to the UK so I can attempt to learn more. My payware aircraft from XP11 kinda work. I’ve tried the T-7 and as long as I keep the throttle high enough it seems to work ok. If I drop the throttle to idle the engine dies and that’s a touch embarrassing.
Citation X in the Andes
I’m somewhere in Chile at the moment and I’m heading to an airport on Antarctica. I have no idea what will exist when I get there and I’m only doing it so I can say I’ve “been” to every continent in my around the world flight. Here’s to many more hours of fun.
The other day the family went for a walk around the local reservoir. It’s not that far and quite a quiet and picturesque place to be. It was calming. While there I took part in a photograph competition between some of my close friends. We also built a tree swing and had some fun rushing in an arc.
Burham Brick Lime and Cement Company
The area we walked through used to be a brick factory. It’s next to the river and in the old days bricks were cooked (?) here after the materials were taken from the North Downs. Then, they were placed on boats and shipped to wherever needed them. I do believe some ended up in Buckingham Palace.
Anyway, you can always find interesting things just lying around. Sometimes these are burnt out vehicles but other times these are discarded bricks with interesting insignia. See the picture I took of a 1910 brick. Someone somewhere will find that brick very interesting.
Yesterday a few of us went canoeing and kayaking [whatever the difference] on the Great Stour. We went from the Grove Ferry Picnic Site to somewhere near Lampen Stream. It was a lovely couple of hours on the river.
This summer I spent a little time at RAF Cranwell and slightly longer at RAF Syerston with a short, unplanned, stop in Newark. This is my story of the National Air and Space Camp 2022. For various reasons I changed from a full week attendance to just half the week. I travelled up to Nottinghamshire [RAF Syerston] on the Wednesday morning, leaving Kent early to get to NASC in time to do some work. The first morning my job was to build Lego, so just like a day at home then! In the afternoon there were some aircraft practices as part of the Industry Day where people come in to sell their companies.
The airshow consisted of displays from a Chinook, a glider performing aerobatics – which was my second favourite, a Puma, a Juno, the Red Arrows, a Typhoon and Spitfire, TWO F-35s did a fly by and tight turn, and there might have been something else that was little but I didn’t pay attention. Of the displays the Typhoon is clearly my favourite, the noise was lovely. The glider came second and I was so impressed with the manoeuvrability and aerobatic ability – a super display.
Spitfire – RAF Syerston National Air and Space Camp
On the Thursday I was helping organise and run the robotics stand. We had a really keen bunch of cadets and I was super impressed with their dedication to the cause. They worked from 0900 to 1700 with minimal breaks trying to solve the problems we had given them. It’s nice to have the cadet contact and be around people who are keen to solve problems and try to work hard.
Juno – RAF Syerston National Air and Space Camp
Friday was meant to be simple, just a rerun of Thursday but we left some kit at RAF Cranwell where we were staying overnight so I offered to go and get it. My car then decided to hit me with a serious YOU MUST STOP warning just as I detoured through Newark because there were road closures and accidents causing massive traffic problems around the A1 junction. I pulled into a one-way street and found a parking place. Very soon the traffic was terrible all around. My predicament, after checking some basic things from internet searches, was that it was likely the car needed towing to Kent. So I had some stuff at RAF Cranwell, some at RAF Syerston and I was in the middle of the two.
Puma – RAF Syerston National Air and Space Camp
People at the camp organised some transport and I managed to collect my things after a relaxing cuppa and bowl of chips at a pub next to a canal. Eventually I called the AA and they came out and I met the man at my car, once I had most of my stuff. He plugged a gizmo into the car OBD2 port and read through the error readings. He deleted the error codes that the car had generated saying that if something is really wrong then it would come back with an error eventually. I let him do his job. I don’t know how these things work. The car worked fine. The AA man followed me back to RAF Syerston and the car behaved.
Since then I have managed to drive home, around town, to Bluewater and back. The car seems back to normal. I have also bought an OBD2 thingy so I can plug in and see data for myself. I might have to delete further error messages so it’s worth getting although I haven’t played with it yet. NASC was good fun in all.
