gamerdad With barely a couple days warning the good folks who make No Man’s Sky released another big #featureupdate earlier today. Of course, it took a solid half hour to download and update my game, and so I bumbled around watching an episode of the Simpsons while the download meter crept ever closer to zero. After I got into the post-update game I thought I would poke around and see if I could find any of this supposed new on-world content. Some of it might be pretty subtle, which is nice because no one wants all their hard base-crafting work to get swamped up in some major overhaul. After noticing a few subtle upgrades in my base systems, I hopped from my established solar system over to a brand new discovery to see what difference that made. I’m in no way critical when I say I’m not sure my old gamer guy brain picked up on much of the changes, which is fine. The game is still a great way to kill a few hours.

gamerdad These night flights ate scenic in their own way while I’m actually playing, but the subtlety in the view is much less impressive as a screenshot. It’s too bad, I guess, that I’m not taking and making videos on this trip which tonight took me deeper into the states and part way across North dakota from Minot to Devils Lake just as the sun had set. I’ve been enjoying the zen of these hour long flights with little to do between takeoff and landing besides point the joystick control on a level course, so I spend a good chunk of my flight listening to an audiobook or a podcast, whatever is handy. That’s the joy of #flightsimulator I suppose—you can just settle in and zone out while logging some time. On a side note, as I closed down the plane and checked my log book a Steam trophy appeared in my notifications letting me know that after tonight’s night flight I had tallied 100 hours of flight time on my profile. So that’s a thing.

gamerdad I left Canada and as I approached the giant cliffs at the border (or maybe it was just a data rendering glitch?!) I crossed into North Dakota where I have never been to in real life but which from the air seems very similar to Saskatchewan except maybe for the abundance of airports south of the 49th. This leg of the journey took me from Estevan to Minot which I presume means a lot to people other than me but which to me means as much as two other random cities on a map and once again arbitrarily chosen because of their relative distance and the shortness of my attention span for #flightsimulator flights longer than an hour.

gamerdad With the return of the real world hot weather on Monday morning, I was back in the basement continuing my #flightsimulator adventure and taking one last Canadian leg as I flew my little orange plane from Moose Jaw to Estevan which is just a few steps away from the Saskatchewan/North Dakota border. I’ve sort of got it in my mind to take a trip down in the direction of Chicago where I actually visited and ran last fall, and yeah again, I could just load up O’Hare airport and zoom around the city, but there is something about earning the view by flying all the way there that just feels right. So, instead I just toddle along at about 100 NMPH and see how many legs it will take me to fly to the windy city. I will say tho that the game was acting a bit wonky today, setting the time to late in the day (which I didn’t notice until I was about mid flight) and then landmarking the airport in the middle of the forest to the west of the runway (while the buildings were to the east) which resulted in me parking the plane under a tree and hoping the log book records my flight as valid even though the luggage guys were going to have a heckuva time unloading my suitcase.

gamerdad I’ve had my eye on a way to continue my adventures through the early 90s comedic adventures of the folks from Cicely Alaska, and Amazon provided this week as the DVD box set of all the seasons went on sale briefly and I happened to be in the right place at the right time to nab myself a copy. Yeah, I did write DVD—that wasn’t a typo. I don’t think I’ve purposefully bought a new-in-the-wrapper DVD in at least a decade, at least since we upgraded to Blu-ray and then have pretty much fallen into the streaming era and turned most of our physical media into interior decorations. And here i went and bought a box with 26 of them inside. But I gotta admit that there is something both nostalgic and appropriate in settling into this classic from my youth as I begin (well, continue) my full-series binge (still in season one) and feel those retro vibes from the old school way of watching this terrific show. One part character study, one part fish out of water, one part magical realism and a whole lot of wholesome classic television for these crazy dark days. Let’s roll.

gamerdad Having flown four previous legs across the Canadian prairies bound for who knows where, my fifth wasn’t really shaping up to be much more exciting. In fact, the sooner that I can get somewhere a bit more interesting (geography wise at least) than a big expanse of prairie farmland as far as the eye can see, the better this #flightsimulator adventure is likely to be. I picked up from my evening flight yesterday where I landed in Saskatoon and in search of cleverly named airports, headed on down to Moose Jaw, where it was, as predicted, flat and sunny out.

gamerdad What can I say but is been a long hot day and I spent a chunk of it in the basement playing #flightsimulator more than ever. Just one more leg, right? And my timing couldn’t have been better. The other side of this little adventure, a rule I made up to make my trips more interesting when I did my trip (part way) around the world, was that I flew in real time, real conditions. The game simulates weather and clouds and .. sunsets. As it turns out flying from Biggar to Saskatoon at 930 mountain time was just about right to hit a perfect sunset flight across the Saskatchewan prairies. I took off to a gloriously low lens flare of the sun low on the horizon and then landed with just enough of a sliver of the sun still peaking over the western skyline for it not to count as a night landing. Hmm… Almost makes me want to get up early enough to try for a sunrise flight outta dodge. Sadly, I think that might be around 4am, so on second thought…

gamerdad I couldn’t help myself. I usually play the most games when the weather is either too cold or too hot to be outside. For mid-July the weather service ordered up a week of 30+ days, so… too hot to be outside. Instead, I continued my adventure eastward and fled Alberta in my still shiny new orange plane. I spent about 45 minutes flying deep into Saskatchewan and landed at the tiny little town of Biggar whose motto, if I recall correctly via a guy I knew back in University who had grew up there, is “New York might be big, but we’re Biggar.” I have been flying with the landing approach assist on, something I didn’t do in my original attempt to fly around the globe. It doesn’t do anything to control the plane but instead projects an idealized series of gates through which a good landing attempt can be made. To be fair I only crashed the plane while landing once back in those early days, but also to be be fair I had turned on that feature at least a year ago when I temporarily got interested in the #flightsimulator life again and now I just haven’t bothered to turn it off. I’m not so proud.

gamerdad After flying from Edmonton to a little hodunk town to the East called Tofield last night, apparently my imaginary self bought a new and faster and oranger plane on facebook marketplace while visiting because I hopped into that new plane this afternoon and picked up off and onward. It may be worth asking if this spells the start of another #flightsimulator adventure, if in fact I’m planning on setting out and seeing where one little virtual aircraft might take me. And while it is not NOT the case, I haven’t made any specific plans to do anything but maybe try to work my way across the country or down into the states and earn some of those lovely out the window views rather than just clicking on the old depart from airport X button and doing a few boring flybys. Y’know, like it’s hard to explain the difference, but there really is something to flying a plane across a scale model of the planet to earn those sightseeing flights. I mean, that’s kinda the whole point of those missions and such, for people who don’t have the imagination to plot an adventure on their own, and here’s me with a whole imagination going on and this simulated planet at my disposal. What a time to be alive, huh? Don’t expect much of anything but a quickie log tho, like me telling you that this afternoon’s flight took me from Tofield to Lloydminster on the border of the province where I made a slick landing in partially cloudy sunshine. East it is then.

gamerdad When the not-so-new-anymore MS Flight Simulator came out in late 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, I bought it on day one and decided to justify my expense by becoming a youtube creator: that is, I recorded about thirty #letsplay videos of myself setting out on a round-the-world adventure in a Cessna. It was fun, but at some point two things happened. One, an update made it trickier to record video due to something on my configuration probably, and so I lost a bunch of footage and lost a bunch of momentum on my trip. And two, people started to get really engaged with my trip, offering advice and feedback and, well, it stopped being fun. I’ve dabbled in #flightsimulator a bit since, but nothing like that 150 hour stretch of flying up the west coast, over through Alaska to Russia and ending up in Japan.. in a prop plane. I took a short trip from Edmonton to rural Tofield this afternoon to see how much I missed it, and I kinda do, but I don’t think I’ll be reprising the youtuber effort anytime soon.

gamerdad As much as I flip flop around with my reading habits, when I really get into a book I tend to stick with it. Sadly, that wasn’t the case when I bought this tome of a non-fiction book over two decades ago. Something compelled me to tackle it again recently though and I’ve made some serious progress—I mean, not enough to offer a coherent opinion yet, but certainly enough to state here that I’m actually reading this one now. Officially, like.

gamerdad I think this was my fifth full play thru since installing this classic on #ps5 a couple weeks ago. I kinda found myself getting into an obsessive groove trying to win this thing on some measure. I would play a great game and then some group I’d barely met on the other side of the map would come up the middle for a culture win or something out of left field. My concession to my own sanity was to turn off all win conditions except for a total point victory. Managing this thing on a console with a controller versus a keyboard makes juggling five different win conditions almost untenable. That said, I still tried to play a balanced game. I founded a custom religion and defended my cities against evangelical takeover. I completed the space race and settled Mars. I built a whole bunch of cultural districts and created nearly twenty works of art/culture. And when some group picked a fight with me and declared war against one of my cities, I took the real low road and started nuking and razing their cities until they begged for a peace deal. I think the only thing I really didn’t excel at was Wonder building, but when the ideal time came round for that I happened to be quite busy trying to keep up a holy war, so… excuses excuses, huh? Overall, I think I might shelf this one for a while now that I trounced at least one round. We’ll see. It is a pretty zen game for those quiet days at home.