The author is all over the place, but it is still interesting video to watch. I didn’t know that in the 80’s BBC was powerful enough to tender its own line of PCs, and then force UK government to finance half of their price.
Also it’s fascinating how they had mixed resolution: part of the screen was “high-res”, but black-and-white, whie the lower part of the screen had 8 colors, but was rendered in lower resolution.
Category: Aleosha Blog
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Painting Skaven
I bought myself an Artis Opus S 00 brush. Surprisingly, it’s better than Rafael. Surprisingly, because it cost the same, more or less, and I thought that Rafael are more “professional”. But it holds the tip slightly better out of the box.
Now I’m experimenting with contrast paints. It’s like painting with acrylic versus watercolors (not that I painted with any in the past 30 years). One one hand, it’s kind of amazing how the model “paints itself”. As the contrast paint dries, it sets into recesses creating natuaral shading. But if you skrew up, it’s harder to fix. You can’t just put another color on top of it anymore.
I think I’ll end up mixing both techniques. As even now I paint metal parts still with metalic paints.
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Netgear Nighthawk AC1900
Netgear Nighthawk D7000 is such a cool piece of hardware, I’m finding trouble simply throwing it away. I bought it on my first business trip to the UK, some 9 years ago.
Although I can understand why in modern times nobody would buy it: DSL is a dead technology by now, and it is not WiFi 6.
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Tacticus
Unlocked Yazaghor, from grinding the campaign battle. Needed for Saim Han Mirror campaign.
Unlocked Sy-Gex, also known as “gay sex” from it’s event. The easiest event unlock yet.
Unlocked Toth, again from grinding the campaign, second character for Saim Han Mirror.
Unlocked Gulgortz on the same day from Guild Raids. This is actually big, because this finally opens the Ork Octarius campaign.
Unlocks have obviously slowing down, as the game wants you to pay 20GBP for a single character. But maybe Ork campaign will help out a little, as you should get 10 scrolls from each campaign.
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Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old
I thought I had Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old, but turns out, it was their Toiteach A Dha, which is peated. While regular Bunnahabhain 12 is just down my lane. It’s very sweet, Aberlour levels if not more, and leaves a nice numbness on the tongue, although no warmth.
This is all thanks to the fact that they release it in 50ml bottles. After great success with Tamdhu tasters and now this, I wish more distilleries would do the same.
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Microhistory Sharp Concepts beer
Another beer I brought from Zurich, this one brewed in Latvia, not a country you associate with beer usually, but then some of the best beers I had were from Norway.
It’s a “German dobblebock”, but at 15%, it’s more of a “qudruperbock” (term that I just invented). Deep amber and opaque, it reminds of classic Gulden Draak. But I’m not sure that extra 5% alcohol adds anything in terms of taste.
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AeroPress Flow Control Filter Cap
After the trip to Texas, where AeroPress proved very useful, I decided that I want to try using a metal filter instead of disposable paper filters, despite the fact that those were widely available. Metal filter works, but the coffee drips even worse than with the paper filters. So the next step was to replace the default filter cap with a pressurized one.
Coffee machines use pressurized baskets to mitigate effect from coffee that was ground long time ago. Here, the idea is that a rubber gasket in the centre prevents coffee from dripping, until you start pressing it.
I’m yet to see the promised crema even with freshly ground coffee, byt at least I don’t end up with hands soaked in hot coffee, which is still a good thing.
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Kingdom Come Deliverance
Someone really wanted an episode where you have to infiltrate a monastery, it seems. The problem is, this kills the pacing of the game. You just led an assault on Cuman camp and chased counterfeiters. Now you have to smuggle wine and wake up in time for morning prayer. Having godly lockpicking and speech skills by that point in the game definitely helps, though.
One of the chores in the monastery is copying books, and it demonstrates well how monks were able to produce those stupid mistakes. Good luck doing better:
Another extremely helpful skill in this game is the “Headcracker” perk. A change to one-hit-kill an opponent by simply aiming to the head is huge. Saved my life many times, for example, when the three bandings still turned up on me despite me spending a week in monastery doing those stupid quests.
At this point you discover that when Sir Radzig called you “my boy”, he didn’t mean it figuratively… And all the royalty knew about it.
After that point, some quests will auto-fail, but guess you can’t get the all 🤷♂️
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Penguin S01
I didn’t watch The Batman with Pattinson. Not a fan of DC or the Batman universe. But after The North Water, I decided to see Colin Farrell play another villain—and I’m glad I did.
The only connection to Batman is some names: Gotham, Arkham, Oswald Cobblepot. Batman himself is literally mentioned twice: at the very start of the first episode and at the very end of the last one. Everything else is a crime drama.
I almost want to say they pulled a bait-and-switch, like Mad Max: Fury Road, which wasn’t really about Mad Max but about Furiosa. But they didn’t. It’s just that Sofia Falcone is very fleshed out here. But so is Penguin. They toe a fine line, without making it a story about a “Girl-Boss” who was told all her life what to do, betrayed by those Evil White Men, and now she will crush them… No, it’s not that kind of story.
I also almost want to say they just repeated what Joker did—creating an ultra-realistic villain attached to his mother. But that’s incorrect too. Phoenix’s Joker wasn’t a villain at all; he was an anti-villain, in the way there are anti-heroes. While Farrell’s Penguin is a full-fledged villain.
The main theme for me in Penguin is the theme of lies. Cobblepot is an absolute liar, as demonstrated in the very first episode when he’s tortured by Sofia, and again in the very last, where she tortures him once more. He never tells the truth, never admits it—he always doubles down. There’s a lot of defiance of expectations throughout. And it’s not just Penguin; his mother plays into this as well. What actually convinced me to keep watching was Deirdre O’Connell in the first episode—that switch between a somewhat lost old woman with dementia and a vicious, megalomaniacal force.
And going back to lies—the biggest lie we tell ourselves is probably that what we do is to make our parents proud.
Visually, it’s so stunning I can hardly believe it’s a TV series. They did borrow a bit from Fallout, with ultraviolence set to jazz songs, but they have their own style too. Probably the scene that impressed me the most was the “vote of confidence” using cheap beer cans. But really, there was so much to unpack. Like the mundainess of Penguin’s violence.
All I can say is—my faith in TV series has returned. For now.
It feels like people understand less and less what made Far Cry tick. Far Cry 3 had immense sense of presence. How cutscenes worked from first-person, how characters followed you with their eyes. By Far Cry 6, it’s all gone. Now your missions are presented on this sterile backdrop.
I haven’t played New Dawn much, I don’t like when I shoot someone in the head and they don’t die. But the makeshift weapon aesthetic is straight from there. Weapons are the only part Ubisoft still didn’t manage to ruin.
What they got right is, for example, that you don’t put a scope on a LMG. But you can put a laser pointer. And that the weapons you get from caches are unique and useful. In really disappointed me in Far Cry 3, when you climb some lighthouse and find absolutely nothing of value.
You also have a pet crocodile now. It’s alright. Don’t remember if Far Cry 5 had pets, and don’t care much for them. Same goes for horses, which aren’t stopped by spinkes at checkpoints.
My trouble is, that the game becomes more and more Just Cause. Now you can climb everywhere with a grappling hook, fall from anywhere with a parachute, steal an ancient Soviet tank by yourself, firing and driving it at the same time.
You pick a phone, and a car is delivered to you anywhere. Everything is so effortless, it’s not fun anymore.
As I wrote at least once already, Saturn version of Virtua Figher 2 was inferior to the arcade original. And that’s the version that was ported to PS2 as part of Sega Ages Collection series.
But from this video I discovered that PS3 and Xbox360 actually had a proper arcade version. I don’t own Xbox360 anymore, but still have PS3, so I gave it a try. And they aren’t wrong. It is indeed the arcade version, with bridges in Shun’s stage and all that.
Interestingly, PC version, which was the first I played, is a mix of the stages from the Saturn version and models from the arcade version. So I was right to remember that PC version somehow looked better.
The main benefit of that version is that there’s a movelist in the pause menu.
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Schorschbrau Schorschbock beer
I never thought I’d write it about a German beer, but this is a mindblowing beer. It doesn’t look like a beer, and doesn’t taste like a beer, though. Completely opaque, like a coffee with a bit of milk in it, and with a heavy sediment. I rarely “taste” anything in beere, unless it’s something like a literal chocolate stout, but here, I can taste chocolate, coffee, and raisins. It’s closer to Madeira at that point than to a beer.
Also the bottle is something else, with the swing-top cap and wax. Theoretically, it could mean you could trink this beer in two seatings, and at 16% it even makes some sense.
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Painting Skaven
I did buy Kolinsky Sable brush from Winsor & Newton, Series 7 size 000. It turned out to be a disappointment. No different from synthetic brushes, and it cost ten times more. Some say they have quality issues, others say there are counterfeits sold on Amazon:
Brand new Windsor & Newton series 7, anything to do to fix it?
byu/beardmire inminipainting
Then I got Raphael 8404 size 0. This is what I was promised from Kolinsky Sable brushes. It didn’t make me an amazing painter, but now I’m able to paint warts on my rats.
Seven rats done, 13 rats to go.
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Apple Pippin
Discovered this console existed thanks to eBay. Someone sells it for 600GBP
This is basically a PowerPC without HDD, but with a gamepad.
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Tamdhu 18 Years Old
Final of the three Tamdhu tasters, and obviously most expensive, at 138GBP per bottle.
It’s very smooth, sweet, adds alot of numbness in the mouth, but no warmth in the throat. Warmth in the belly comes long after.
Is it worth extra 40GBP on top of Tamdhu 15? I’d say it depends. If you already have Tamdhu 15, probably not. But if it’s the only Tamdhu you plan to get for a while, then I’d say yes, although it is a stretch for sure.
Completed Persona 2 Eternal Punishment.
Of course there is another Xibalba golden temple, called here Torifune. I’m not sure if it’s more annoying than the one in Innocent Sin or slightly less. There are unavoidable traps, which I consider a bad design choice, but the dungeon is slightly shorter.
The nice thing about Eternal Punishment is there are some unique abilities to the character-specific personas, with dedicated animations, that makes them feel special, and really burn through enemies.
There is a system of registering and duplicating spell cards in this game. In later games, this will be replaced with registering and resummoning personas.
Despite beating the final boss on my second try, I still consider it quite ridiculous. I had to resurect characters 40 times, as he continuously smashes all characters for 3/4 of their life.
But hey, my characters were level 69-71, while a guide I read later suggest them to be 80-90 😆
Overall, I think it’s a shame they decided to split the game into two parts. Innocent Sin had a compeling story that ended with a cliffhanger, but the sequel is mostly the same ideas, with more dungeon grinding on top.
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Painting Skaven
I thought that what I’m missing is a better brush. Turns out, what I was missing is a better magnifying glass.
There are magnifying glasses for 10-15GBP, with names like NZQXJXZ. I went for a 30GBP magnifying glass instead. It worked, but I didn’t like the shadows.
Now I got myself a magnifying glass from Brightech. Twice as expensive, 70GBP, but what a difference it makes. There are no reflections, and no shadows whatsoever. I immediatelly noticed mistakes I made with the previous glass just a couple of days ago, and fixed them using exactly the same brushes.
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Painting Skaven
Both the handbook and the official video paint Skaven half-assedly. I of course do no have the talent to paint them to the level of someone who did that for 10-20 years. But those are rats, rats should have pink tails, and both of the official guides don’t care to paint them any differently at all.
Stormcasts are pain to paint mainly because of their shields and pauldrons. Skaven require a lot of colors.
There’s metal.
There’s wood.
There’s leather.
There are their teeth and nails.
There’s the tail and tongue.
They also have two layers of fabric instead of just one.
And I also decided not to paint fur. In the official art, they are mostly fur-less, with exposed skin and just some patches of fur. But I wanted the pinkish tail to be the contrast, so my skaven have short white fur, I guess.
The game tries very hard to tie-in the first Persona, something Innocent Sin never attempted to do. I never played Persona 1, so all those Guido and The Boy With an Earing don’t mean anything to me.
After the Underwater Temple, Ellen leaves the party (no big loss, although that could be said about most characters in this game), and Tatsuya joins. Now we have Katsuya and Tatsuya, great! Tatsuya explains that he’s the conciense of Tatsuya from The Other Side in a body of Tatsuya from This Side. Although technically This Side is the Other Side 😆
At least he arrives leveled enough, while all my other characters seem to be constantly underleveled, as no matter how much I grind, it still doesn’t seem to be enough.
Finally discovered what the different metals are for: summoning unique personas. And those are used automatically, when you reach around level 50.
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Tacticus
Eldrion is indeed a game changer, literally. The damage out is now x2 if not x3
Eldar campaign seems to be much easier than others, that have steep difficulty spikes. And it also has much more lore embedded in it.
Unlocked Forgefiend through guaranteed requisition. As I mentioned multiple times, war machines are not very useful.
Then through another requisition unlocked both Abaddon and Anuphet. One one hand, this is incredible, as both are very expensive characters to unlock. And Anuphet is very useful, as there’s a Necron campaign that allows to farm Ultramarine characters. On the other hand Abaddon… Not so much.
From requisition milestone rewards got Wrask. Not very useful.
Unlocked Isaak during his release event. He isn’t that great, as you need other Genestealers and Genestealers in general aren’t worth getting. But I grab what I can.
