Self-Set Backboard Consistency: 23BC-0377-C228-A338

Pro Shots: D1F3-0DA5-8A7F-A6F2

Advanced Corner Defense: 4F30-F150-B056-D887

Defensive Backboard Reads:9F09-E4D3-EAB0-69AD

The Ultimate Warm-up: FA24-B2B7-2E8E-193B

Aerial Shots - Redirects: 8D93-C997-0ACD-8416

Backboard Training: 18B2-38AF-FBD6-F190

These are the training packs I do most at the moment. I'm not necessarily good at all of them, but I do them because they're challenging. I also play a good amount of free play which allows for more natural situations to practice the techniques in.

In terms of workshop maps, I mainly play:

Dribbling Challenge 2

Speed Jump: Boost

I upgraded my PC last month. AMD Ryzen 3900x, Nvidia RTX 2070 Super, 32GB 3200 MHz RAM, 500GB M.2 SSD drive, 1.5TB of SATA SSD. Seeing as though my last PC was a mid tier build back in 2012, it's quite a substantial upgrade. Needless to say, I am loving it.

Undertale

I played half of this game a few months ago and stopped because I thought it sucked. Every time it came up that I thought it sucked, Undertale fans fired back "did you complete it though!?" I got tired of this so I begrudgingly grinded out the last half of the game. Suffice to say, it only strengthened my opinion that it sucks.

Everything that people like this game for just didn't resonate with me.

Rocket League

I still play this daily. I'm trying to get to Champion 1 rank this season. What I like about this game is that even if i'm not in the mood to be competitive, I can just put an album on and do training packs and workshop maps. It's relaxing in a way. Not to mention all the fun you an have with modifiers in a private lobby.

Red Dead Redemption 2

I had some reservation about the optimisation of this game, but it runs great once you get your head round the mind-boggling amount of graphics settings. It looks great but I have had a few crashes, not too bad though. Overall I am loving it. It's a slow burn but it's one I am enjoying. The detail and depth of the world draws you right in; it certainly has a lot more life to it that the often barren feeling original (which was the first game I ever got 100% on).

At some points I think the writing is a bit plain. Also, the honour system seems a bit dumb. Doing a good dead feels kind of mooted when in the next mission you're wiping out an entire town's worth of people.

Hollow Knight

I've played about 15 hours of this and mostly had a fantastic time. The art and music is great. The controls are tight. The gameplay is challenging but not unfairly so. And revealing the world is a delight. However, I grew tired of the constant backtracking through the dungeons which is only accentuated by the quick travel system being is bit too spread out.

Then there's the horrible mechanic where if you die, your soul and money is held ransom at the point at which you died. If you then fail to reclaim it without dying again, you lose all your money. And you often respawn quite far away from the point at which you died based on the last bench you sat on. These benches act as save points and respawn points and again are quite spread out. Whenever this happened to me, I took matters into my own hands and modified my save file to get my money back. Check my PC privilege bro.

I understand that this a nature of these sorts of games, but it just laborious. I'm not sure I'll complete it.

Forza Horizon 4

I got 3 months of Xbox Game pass for PC with my new PC. This was the first thing I installed from it. It's as good as I hoped. The game is gorgeous, and the racing is varied. It treads the perfect balance between arcade and simulation.

It's also a pleasure to race around locations that I know and have attachments too. It's part of the reason I loved The Witcher 3. Not that I knew of any of the locations in it, but the medieval European countryside made me nostalgic for the country villages and market towns in which I grew up. Travelling environments that feel relatable to your own life makes a great game all the more special I think.

Lonely Mountains Downhill

Another from the game pass. A small but super fun game. The controls are tight and the sound is perfect. Though the graphic style is far from realistic, it captures the environments really well. A friend of a friend of a friend made this game and apparently he's pretty much set for life off of it. Fair play.

Golf With Your Friends

A dumb but fun game to play with you mates at the end of the night. Some of the levels are ridiculous, but you jsut have to embrace it. Not much more to say on it really.

Ace Combat 7 and A Plague Tale: Innocence

I bought these in the Steam sale but have yet to play them. I'm waiting to complete RDR2 first, otherwise my time will be too spread out.

Logical. I did notice a lot of crap comes off of it during its first few soaks. It gets into the air and chokes you out. I wouldn't want my fish swimming around in that.

I gave up on the aquarium community when they had their two-year-long affair with kitty-litter planted tanks

On a related note, quite a few bonsai tree owners (including myself) have their trees planted in specific brands of cat litter. It needs to be ones which are 100% moler clay. It's holds on to a lot of moisture whilst still providing good draining so that the roots don't become waterlogged.

Unfortunately, the brand of choice in the UK has recently been discontinued.

R.A.P. Ferreira - Doldrums

Body Hound - Spectrum

Cameron Vale - Jouska

Ichiko Aoba - Amuletum

I heard it was going to be a part of Trump's UK trade deal.

There's a maxim in kayaking: we're all between swims. And the real danger beings once you're swimming. If you don't join a club, it's sage advice to kayak with others around. Because when you fall out of your kayak in an unfavourable position, being on your own makes things a lot more dangerous and difficult. You want people around who can help you.

A river running kayak can also be used as a touring kayak (i.e. one made for flat or calm water). A true touring kayak will be longer than a river runner as the added length helps to maintain speed. They'll also have a skeg (a fin centered on the bottom of the boat) that keeps the boat tracking in a straight line. You can also get crossover boats that seek to bridge the gap between the two.

There's not many things that willingly get me out of bed before dawn on a rainy winter's morning. It really is the best. Being on the water, pushing yourself, and going on adventures with great people. Not to mention that it's great exercise. I couldn't recommend it more.

The kayak in that video is an older model (2003) and only cost me £170 second-hand from an acquaintance. Considering my paddle was £150 second-hand, I can't complain about the price. It's what's known as a "river play" boat. It's designed to offer a middle ground between a bigger, more stable river running boat and a smaller, more agile play boat (essentially a trick boat). So in short, yes it is designed specifically for whitewater.

You can read about the different types of whitewater kayaking here.

My pure river running boat cost me £600 on a clearance offer. For reference, the latest top-of-the-line boats will set you back £1500-£2000. And the profit margins are very thin for the manufacturers, so really they should be selling them for more.

If you wanted to try it out though, your best bet would be to find a local club. They will have boats, paddles, and PFDs that you can try as part of the session price. And often they will have pool sessions which can be more inviting for beginners around this time of year.

Kayaking

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4qIFpSArVO/

I've been going from strength to strength with my kayaking. I got a new boat that has a lot less volume and is a lot more playful. It's added some excitement to some of the easier rivers around this way and punishes mistakes more. That's meant that I've increasingly had to rely on my roll and it's feeling real solid right now.

The interesting thing about rolling a kayak is that it starts off as a mechanical challenge most often practiced in the relative serenity of a swimming pool. Once you have the mechanics dialed, there's no reason you can't apply them to real whitewater with equal success. But then you're disorientated by the water rushing around you, the welcoming dark brown of the UK's rivers swallow the light, and the cold bites at your body. But still, the required movement remains the same. So at that point the roll becomes a head game instead. Right now, I tend to feel pretty zen when I flip over,, which is cool. I take a metaphorical breath, then just roll up on autopilot.

Maybe that's due to the cold showers I've been taking.

Music

https://clyp.it/clroh5d1?token=0bfc978c628c7d6cc74dc203e7ca92d4

I finished a new track today. It's a different direction to the jazz fusiony stuff I was doing for the last couple of years. I only have one other track in this vein and I don't plan to focus on this style exclusively. But it's been fun to make purely electronic music again, especially as it gave me a chance to actually make use of my Behringer Neutron.

I can't help but feel like that's an impossible goal to achieve on a wide scale for a populace whose educational system has already failed them. At least in the short term. Getting information to people is one thing, but getting them to actually consider it and adjust their views is another. I mean, you don't even have to be "stupid" for that to be true.

The UK general election is today and the likely outcome is a conservative majority. People have been given plenty of opportunities during the campaign to see Boris Johnson for the lying, homophobic, racist, manipulative, double-crossing, floundering, selfish, bully that he is.

A man whose own Chief of Staff said of him: "A compulsive liar who has betrayed every single person he has ever had dealings with: every woman who has ever loved him, every member of his family, every friend, every colleague, every employee, every constituent"

Yet, people will still vote for him because "get brexit done"

That people are stupid is a thought that's been caught creeping around the borders of my brain a few times recently. And as much as it feels distasteful, it's hard not to still believe it.

I think my only real big complaint is that the game is a bit too over populated with enemies and loot (makes encountering both too common to feel precious)

This is made worse by the fact that the enemy AI is terrible. They either just sprint towards you or stand out in the open a few meters away. Then I just melt through them with all my easily found top-tier weapons and ammo (whilst my companions soak up most of the attacks). Or when a disguise fails in a restricted areas and you're spotted, you can just use the most basic speech checks to evade any trouble. The game feels so easy on the default difficulty. And all the higher difficulties do is up the damage enemies inflict. The enemy variety is also lackluster.

Another gripe is that, excluding that first big decision you have to make, none of the in-world decisions feel that impactful. This is amplified by the fact that there always seems to be a way that you can have your cake and eat it too by pleasing all sides of issue. Don't get me wrong, that's cool in some scenarios. But I'm 15 hours into the game and have made multiple world-effecting decisions, yet all the opposing factions still like me. That seems a bit odd.

Despite having spewed all that negativity, I am overall enjoying the game though. As you say, the writing is generally fantastic and the world it creates is enough to elevate the game. I especially love all the subtle interactions that happen between the characters. The gunplay, whilst not being anything to write home about, is also satisfying.

My process feels very slow, as I need to carefully listen and do a lot of experiments to get the sound that I have somewhere in my head.

I've been writing music for over a decade, and I can tell you that this never stops being the case. To quote Leonard Cohen:

Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it… I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines

To find a song that I can sing, to engage my interest, to penetrate my boredom with myself and my disinterest in my own opinions, to penetrate those barriers, the song has to speak to me with a certain urgency... To be able to find that song that I can be interested in takes many versions and it takes a lot of uncovering.

But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.

Ultimately, it is this process that makes creating art so rewarding.

Car Bomb - Scattered Sprites

Hemlock Ernst - Down

Tedeschi Trucks Band - Tiny Desk Concert

Gramm - Legends / Nugroove TM