But, I still had a fun week!

Lake Daylesford

With spring here, I anticipated that my usual haunt out at #LakeDaylesford here in Victoria would have plenty mushrooms. I mean, it’s almost the end of spring now, and Lake Daylesford has never ceased to amaze me with its flourish of mushrooms. The beautiful red and white spotted Amanita Muscaria are usually always there this time of year, along with Slippery Jacks.

This year however, it seems there was a bit of a drought. That, or the local council finally put an end to it and removed all the mushrooms to prevent people getting sick?

I do think it’s the weather, as I went up the road to a usual lookout for a waterfall, and there was no water flowing at all this year. This is concerning.

Anyway, I took my mother to Lake Daylesford and we had a wonderful walk around the lake. I didn’t manage to snap any high quality photos of mushrooms, and yes, I did find a single Amanita out there on its own, but I didn’t manage to get a good photo using my camera. I did get a sneaky shot on my phone though.

Other than that photo though, I did manage to snap and edit some beautiful shots of the lake and surrounds.

I am most proud of this one from the day. The colours really came out well post-edit and I like the composition. Looking at it now though, I could have centred the house perfectly and cropped out some of the leaves showing on the right of the image.

In this photo of the bench, I thought it looked nice and told a little story in itself. The lonely bench with no one sitting on it currently, looking over the waters. I like how the plants up ahead in the lake just happened to align with the bench though. Again, I could have centred it better post-editing.

I loved this overall shot of the lake. I didn’t have a wide enough lens with me to really capture it all, but now thinking about it, I should have zoomed in more and captured the area to the left reaching over to the centre of the photo and captured more detail there, perhaps centering the largest tree there to the image. Maybe next time!

Actually, below is an edit of that photo just to see. Unfortunately though, I don’t currently have a powerful enough camera to crop in so much and I lose a lot of the detail. Still cannot wait to get my new camera! And looking at the photo again, I should show the full reflection of that tree in the water too! Live and learn!

Then I tried something new for me by taking a photo directly into the sun. I noticed a young boy fishing and setting up his rod. The reflection of the sun in the water was nice and I felt this photo looked best in a black and white setting, making the boy look more like a silhouette style photo.

Before leaving Lake Daylesford, I then took my mother to the local botanical garden known as Wombat Hill Botanical Garden. I really loved the way the leaves fallen on the floor were turning yellow and adding such nice contrast in colours along the dirt pathway in there, so I took a moment to try and capture that in a photograph.

If you like any of the photos that you see, you can grab them for free or “buy me a coffee” by visiting my Ko-Fi page.

What do you think of my photos?

Gaming - Sea of Thieves

I started playing a new game with an online friend of mine. The game is called Sea of Thieves.

The game is pretty cool. You play as a pirate and the objective obviously is to go around looking for treasures and getting involved in a lot of piracy by stealing loot from other players as well.

You sail the seas in a ship that requires other people to be with you to assist with tasks on the ship. Such as someone to captain and steer the ship, someone to manage the sails, someone to fire the cannons and someone to manage any damage to your ship.

It’s pretty addictive, I will admit. However, they ruined the game by adding loads of micro-transactions that you can purchase with real money which then completely takes away from the game as a whole.

You see, the micro-transactions allow you to purchase cosmetic upgrades to your character, equipment and ship. You would think that this in itself wouldn’t ruin a game, as this doesn’t make it pay to win.

However, this whole game, there are no skills or levelling involved, and a fresh player has the same abilities and strengths as a veteran player. The whole objective of this game is to loot treasures and make coins, which you can use in supply shops to purchase new cosmetic upgrades to your character, ship and equipment.

So if you go ahead and purchase these with real money, the rest of the game just suddenly becomes boring with no more progression.

This explains also why this game has huge issues with cheats. Even with their so called anti-cheat system.

Vibe Coding

I’ve been using a lot of AI to assist me with the coding of this blog. Since I do not have the knowledge to do it all myself.

This week I did more updating to the blog, including adding a new feature that allows my images to be clicked on to load a type of lightbox, enlarged image with alt text showing beneath it.

I also made more updates to the home page where latest posts and replies show. #Hashtags and such will now auto link so that you can search them for recent posts syndicated into Mastodon.social. Any webmentions and links also work through this page without having to open the individual posts.

Daughters Birthday

My daughter Zoey had her 11th birthday! We went with 10 of us to play some #LaserTag and it was awesome fun. I haven’t played laser tag in more than 10 years now and it brought back fond memories.

The kids absolutely loved the day. After laser tag we spent some of the afternoon in the arcade section and earning tickets to spend on sweets and little toys.

We would have done some #GoKarting, but didn’t realise it had gotten so expensive! They want $50 now for a session!

SL Colonies

SL Colonies is my Indie Game that I have been developing with a coding friend for more than 6 years. It’s an #RPG system with crafting and survival that was made to work within the Second Life platform. Part of the #metaverse.

Anyway, we finally finished making a full questing system for the game that allows RPG world builders to fully build quests and story-lines from scratch.

Can’t wait to see this new system in action by our community!

Conclusion

Every week I get to the recap writing, and always look at what I’ve done briefly and think that I am not going to have much to write about - but I seem to always prove myself wrong. There’s always so much to recap on that I enjoy typing and going through what I accomplished and what I did not accomplish.

Although I didn’t do a lot of my tasks, such as my daily exercises and meditation and readings, I feel I have still been productive enough all in all.

Ok, while the wording productive might not be the best example, the life experiences are still there. I wouldn’t really think twice about what I’ve done over the week if I didn’t #journal and #microblog about everything on a daily basis, and then write about the whole week. It really puts a different perspective on life and I highly recommend you guys get into it.

It’s funner than I thought, that’s for sure!