State of the me

Finding out Boris had been hospitalised just before bed apparently scared me almost more than anything else has. I think it's the prospect of Dominic 'who could have guessed Dover is a major port?' Raab as acting PM. Shudder.

Last night I dreamt of being in a crowd. Normally I dislike crowds, this one I didn't. Hmm!

I spent a couple of hours in the garden both Saturday and Sunday. This is a pleasant way to escape not being able to go anywhere else and relatively early in the year for it. I'm probably going to spend a couple of hours out there today, I might even do some work - there's a clump of something that is slowly swallowing the top end of the garden and I feel it needs an introduction to Mr Strimmer.

In gaming, I started a new playthrough of Stellaris after the recent release of the 'Federations' DLC. I haven't bought Federations, but under the Paradox DLC model they release all the new game mechanics as a freebie update and just keep the content/story elements specific to the DLC, so I now get to join Federations, and have the Galactic Community sitting overhead and passing such things as the Galactic Buzzword Standardization Act. I decided to dip a toe in the species creation and the new Origins feature, so I'm playing as the 'Children of Earth', who are a lost colony and greener than traditional humans, but not the militarists who are the default lost human colony. Of course as soon as I bumped into the actual Terran Humans it turned out they have become militarists in the meantime - sigh. I'm doing well, my default strategy of massive expansion through strategic systems to block the AI nations from whole areas of the galaxy is now even easier given Federations introduced Admin buildings to build, which mean I don't get the fairly major debuff for having more systems than my bureaucracy can handle - yes, even your galactic empire runs on red tape and tax returns. There remains one thing that is terribly frustrating. I discovered, through an archaelogical event chain, the home world of one of the past galactic giants. It's a ruined ringworld, it connects directly to my home system, and I discovered it incredibly early in the game. It could become the hub of my empire. And while I have all the needed resources, I just don't have the tech needed to repair it.

I've been doing some admin-y stuff in my Ark game, one of the major building mods I use is getting a second edition, and I've decided I'm going to switch to using it, and replace all of the stuff I built with its first edition (which I can then drop, speeding up my loading times) . This is at least eight bases across four different maps. Complicating things, it's switched from having right-angled triangular pieces (unique in Ark), to equilateral triangular pieces (like pretty much everything else in Ark). So that base I had with the alternating octagonal and square levels - total redesign. Two down, six to go.

I keep thinking I should get back to my technothriller WIP, but it's so near future that a whole bunch of things could change as a result of coronavirus, and that makes it kind of hard to motivate myself. I'll probably get to it at some point this week, but it'll certainly need to change once things have stabilised.