davidgillon | Entries tagged with ark

Playing Ark Wednesday night, on the new Extinction map for the first time since before Christmas, and I've still got the Christmas event with Raptor Claus enabled.

Raptor Claus, from Ark, Survival Evolved

So every in-game 12PM Raptor Claus flies over the map dropping presents, and I hop on Pterry, my trusty, but rather weight-limited pteranadon to try and get to one before it despawns. First time, out in the hideously dangerous Wastelands, I succeed, second time, in the theoretically far safer city ... does not go well.

I did actually find the present, but it was stuck on a ledge of a building, with no room for me to hop off to to pick it up. So I landed nearby to consider what to do, and hopped off the pteranodon. And off the edge of the roadway I'd landed on - I looked, there was room! So now I'm plummeting several hundred feet to my death. At the last minute I realise I'm wearing a parachute and use it. But now I'm stuck in the canyon, which splits the city, and which only has a couple of ways out. I set off towards the one that comes out near my base, and I somehow miss it, or turn the wrong direction. What I do find is a pack of raptors, which kill me - "Clever Girl!" So I'm now lying dead in the canyon, with all my gear. and I haven't had time to accumulate a lot of gear on that map.

So I respawn back at base, grab the minimal amount of gear available, and my trusty iguanadon steed Igzelda ,and hurry over to where I can see my death marker from the edge of the canyon. I freeze Igzelda in a cryopod so I can carry her, and I'm about to leap off the edge of the canyon when I realise I don't actually have a parachute on me. That's down there on my body. So short delay while I gather the resources for a parachute. I parachute into the canyon, grab my gear, and unfreeze Igzelda. Yay, triumph!

Unfortunately, I decide that the shortest way out of the canyon will be to carry on to its end. This takes me into the wastelands, where I loop around to find the next way into the city. 20 metres in I realise that's teeming with raptors and pull a u-turn, unfortunately something spots me, and it's an Alpha Raptor, for those times when a plain "Clever Girl" isn't enough. So new death marker.

At this point, I give up. I respawn and go into cheat mode. This is a pain as you're basically stuck at walking pace, but you can walk in the air, so nothing can get you. I finally get to my death marker to find the Alpha Raptor is still trying to kill Igzelda* As I'm getting closer she breaks free and makes a run for it. Yay! She runs straight into a pair of brontosauri, which object to the rude interruption, one of them tail-swats her, and she dies. Bugger. But at least it's sufficient distraction for me to grab my gear, again.

Finally I make it back to base, to find all of my tame creatures are outside, rather than inside, and a titanoboa is killing them. I rush in to kill the titanoboa, still in cheat mode, and somehow get swatted through the map. I die. My gear is unretrievable.

At this point I really do give up, and start spawning in replacement gear and creatures.
I guess I must have been on Santa's naughty list.

* Different map sections only process when you're actually in them.

Current Mood: Seriously?
Current Location: In the underworld, literally

So I'd no sooner gotten over Disabled People Destroy SF rejecting my fiction submission, than I got a rejection for my non-fiction submission - "didn't work for me". I suspect it may have been too confrontational for their liking. Turns out two rejections in relatively quick succession seems to double up on the effects. I was expecting the self-doubt and the depression, but the anger was new. Not quite sure how to deal with these other than to keep trying and seeing if I can build up a tolerance.

Damn, I really wanted to crack that market. Well, I want to crack any market, but that one particularly mattered to me.

The depression meant I was late getting back to my sister with my input for the next meeting re Dad's care funding, which meant she ran into various issues, and ended up with the two of us on the phone to each other at half past midnight last night, which is not an ideal time for discussing the technical minutiae of the CHC Decision Support Tool (though I suspect they'll be fairly freaked just by the fact we've looked it up and run through it ourselves). It turns out there is actually something more depressing than running through a benefit assessment form for yourself - running through it for a family member who can no longer handle it themselves.

One unexpected benefit of all of this was that when I went to open up the Word file for the DST, expecting to have to use Word Online, my desktop said "Hang on while I install Office" (or words to that effect). I'd worked out a couple of weeks ago that the desktop and laptop somehow had two different Microsoft accounts with the same email address, and when MS asked which one I was trying to use managed to get the desktop logged onto the laptop account, and that seems to have made the difference the next time I tried to open an Office file. I thought I was going to have to buy an additional license for the desktop to cover it (Word Online is too slow for anything but a backup), but clearly my Office subscription either covered the desktop under the main license or included a spare license - score!

When I should have been looking at the DST I was actually playing Ark. Which turns out to be very good as a distraction, but not so good for my wrists, which are stinging through overuse. I've had this before with other games, if I cut down on the amount I've been playing then they should settle down relatively quickly (but note the 'if'). I've also taken measures to cut down what I'm doing within the game by (quite literally) pitching two thirds of my dodos over the compound wall. OTOH I've now tamed two triceratops (Tyrone and Teri), which make good pack mules. Fortunately you can leave those tied to a hitching rail near a feeding trough and ignore them until you need them. I've also tamed six parasaurolophus (-opholi? Para, Ventura, Mara, Alpha and Omega and Lara) for riding. I only intended taming a couple of parasaurs, but Mara and Lara both spawned on my doorstep and it was easier to tame them than do anything else, while Alpha and Omega turned up as Mara and Ventura's egg. What started out as a separate barn for the dodos (their squawking was driving me up the wall) has now become a dodo barn/general hatchery. Alpha and Omega worked fine (incidentally they have a particularly evil-looking colour scheme - black scales with orange highlights on their spinal ridges), but Tyrone and Teri's egg Treo dropped dead on me shortly after hatching. I'm now working my way through my stored fertile dodo eggs, but any hatchlings without interesting colour mutations get pitched over the wall - essentially I've turned into a breeder of overgrown budgies.

Current Mood: Mixed
Current Location: Dodo Bay Dinosaur Hatchery

An email arrived last night just as I was thinking of going to bed. I made the mistake of checking it there and then - it was a rejection from Disabled People Destroy SF for The Art of Breathing. Damn, that was a market I really wanted to succeed in. They still have my essay, but it's the story I'm invested in. The only comment was that it had "some interesting ideas".

So I didn't get to sleep when I wanted, but I did do some useful thinking. Yoon's comments have set me to thinking that it's difficult to get a mystery to work in 6,000 words, particularly one that needs a significant amount of character background, and that really needs additional suspects (the mystery as it stands is "why did my ventilator fail", with the denoument as "Oh, actually that was an attempt to kill me, whoa!", whodunnit is obvious from that point). So the answer is probably to set it on the back burner, and let some additional sub-plots and characters ferment, then address it at longer length. One option is to pull it back to being near contemporary, rather than an undefined amount of time in the future, effectively shifting it into detective/technothriller rather than SF.

In other news, with the snow gone I managed to get out for the first time in a week and get some shopping done. Asda's sliced bread aisle appeared to have been stripped by locusts, though their in-house bakery was fully stocked. It looks like deliveries hadn't been getting through, which is a bit surprising when it's 2 minutes off the M2 and on a main road.

( Cut for (Virtual) Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw )

Current Mood: Rejected
Current Location: Okay, where next

Well, I finally submitted "The Art of Breathing" to Disabled People Destroy SF Monday evening. It was pretty much ready to go on Sunday, but computer issues, and a whole lot of submission anxiety, complicated the whole issue. I'm now noodling about with a non-fiction piece entitled "Why Helva is Bad for SF", and have until tomorrow to finish it if I want to submit if to the same destination. It's easy enough to show "The Ship Who Sang" is just plain bad about disability, despite being the book SF fans are likeliest to nominate as good about disability, but showing it's bad for the genre is a bit more difficult, and may require making the reader actually think.

It's snowing outside, and while I renamed 'the Beast from the East" as "the Pest headed West" based on yesterday's lack of performance, today actually is more convincing, with about 4" of snow on the ground. That's by far the most we've had this winter, but still falls short of its headline billing in my opinion. Of course it's still snowing, and has been almost constantly for about 16 hours, so there's time yet.

In Ark news, I pulled on my big girl panties (female character) and headed out for some exploration. My nervous foray onto the plateau at the top of the hill revealed it's actually Weathertop (yes, this is the official in-game name) and one of the few really safe areas. Looking north from the edge of Weathertop through my spyglass, I spotted a couple of Chalicotheriums, which very much remind me of the mecheiti in Cherryh's Foreigner books, though the most straightforward literary reference would be the actual chalicos used as riding beasts in Julian May's "Saga of the Exiles". I suspect I'll use Weathertop as a forward base from which to head north into the redwood forests, though I really want to tame a chalico so I can do that mounted. The dodos continue to be a nuisance and I'm massively expanding the pens so I can actually move around without being constantly blocked by dodos.

Speaking of Cherry's Foreigner books, I finished Deliverer last night. The blurb is oddly wrong, describing 8yo Cajeiri as "playing pranks and causing mischief". It's right that Cajeiri is bored, but what he is doing is far from playing pranks. He actually has a well-reasoned plan (for an 8yo who doesn't understand the security risks) for maximising his freedom and is pursuing it subtly. The closest he comes to a 'prank' is rudely yelling a question, and he understands exactly why it was wrong. The blurb is also completely wrong in categorising the threat to him as because he's spent two years living among humans. The threat is solely related to the fact he is Ilisidi's heir, the heir to Malguri, the Eastern fortress where the series first kicked into gear a decade or more ago. There are clearly threads left unexplained in the resolution, the Ship-Aijiin have got a huge explanation coming as to what they've been up to, with 'instrument packages' dropped all over the continent. but I think I'm actually going to go back and restart the series from Foreigner. I'd need to revisit the books to write the review I want to, and I know I missed some of the fundamental stuff feeding into the Destroyer/Pretender/Deliverer sequence, so rather than trying to find book 10, I'll restart from 1 and try to comment as I go.

Current Mood: Thermophilic
Current Location: Weathertop

When you're four days from a submission deadline, have vital changes to make courtesy of your beta (thanks Yoon!) , and the only computer with Word installed decides to stop working....

I knew my laptop needed fixing, the keyboard has been somewhat dud for months, but I hoped I could get this submission done using a plug-in keyboard before trying to repair it myself or sending it off for repair if I couldn't. (See 'only computer with Word installed' for why I was so reluctant to risk not having it). Only now the dud keyboard has decided rather than having keys that don't work, it'll have ones that intermittently decided to work constantlyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

It completely locked up the laptop earlier, and I was terrified I'd lost the first half of the changes. I seriously considering dismantling and disconnecting the keyboard in the hopes that would stop it and allow me to get back in with the remote keyboard. But then I remembered there's an online version of Word. I still needed to get back in, so thank god it's intermittent rather than truly constant, but I dived in, saved a copy on Onedrive and switched computers.

Word Online lacks a few features, but it's perfectly usable, and my changes are done. Moral of the story, make sure you're saving copies onto Onedrive and check out Word Online if you haven't already as you never know when you might need it.

In Ark news, I worked out that the falling egg production after evicting all but one of the male dodos was probably down to Frederick the Dodo actually being Fredericka. Whoops! I then went on a big supplies gathering expedition on my raft, round into the next bay, where I was killed several times in the early game. It seemed much less scary this time. Well at first it did, anyway.

Having filled the raft three quarters of the way to capacity and started home, I spotted one last spot I wanted to hit. Greed will get you every time. I'm busy chopping wood when I spot a sarchosaurus waddling ashore. First one I've seen, but there's no mistaking that giant crocodile look. So I leg it back to the boat and as I'm trying to steer it off the beach the sarco spots me and attacks. I killed it, but not before it had completely trashed all of the supply crates on the raft, leaving everything I'd gathered scattered in the shallows. Cue me frantically building new supply crates as night falls with one eye constantly looking around in case he brought a friend.

I was lucky.

Current Mood: Lucky
Current Location: All adrift
Current Music: Crocodile Shoes

Given yesterday's unwanted and unexpected stress, I decided to reward myself when one of the games on my Steam Wishlist came up at 66% off.

So this morrning I installed Ark:Survival Evolved, which drops you onto a 70km2 island populated by dinosauria and megafauna equipped with nothing more than your underwear. The idea is to survive, build things, and eventually explore the various SFnal artefacts scattered around. It's designed to be massively multiuser, with people grouping in tribes, but I just plan on using it for a little relaxing solo gaming

Now it looks absolutely gorgeous, but the documentation is utterly crap, the initial user guide doesn't even document the control keys. So I'm wandering around trying to figure stuff out, and there are various non-aggressive dinosaurs wandering by. Then I run into a small one in a patch of vegetation.

You remember that scene in Jurassic Park where Nedry, the hacker, runs into the cute little dilophosaurus, which promptly flares out its fan, spits in his eye, and eats him? That.

Dilophosaurus with fan extended, just prior to eating Nedry

Absolutely classic!