Media - screenshot - Page 1

I really hope one of the expansions for Forza Horizon 6 is a rally one like FH5 had, that was so much fun. The rally-spec cars are such a blast to drive because they accelerate like an absolute motherfucker but don't go to absolutely ludicrous speed like supercars do so you don't end up sitting there going "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT". 😅

Posted on 30 May 2026, 21:43

A screenshot of the Subaru Vivio, it's a very small red hatchback that's been lowered and big rims put on. The design of it very much brings to mind the Mazda 121 of the 90s. It's parked in a very narrow alley in Tokyo at night, with a bunch of lit-up shop signs stretching away down the alley, and it's been raising so there are water drops on the car and reflections in the puddles on the road in front of the car.

Forza Horizon 6 is out, and as per tradition I've taken a teensy little car and turned it into an absolute pocket rocket. 😁 This is a 1994 Subaru Vivio RX-R that now weighs all of 757kg but has a 4-cylinder 2.0L naturally-aspirated engine in it and it puts out 169kW! It's AWD so you basically point it in a direction and it'll fly there. I could have gone really nuts and added a turbo and done more engine upgrades but I wanted to keep it in Class B.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 25 May 2026, 21:55

A screenshot from towards the very end of the last episode of Babylon 5. The character Delenn is sitting on a bench in front of trees, she's an alien but mostly human-looking except she has no eyebrows and she's got a band of sort of like bone that starts just above her ears and wraps around the back of her head. She's wearing fancy golden and brown dress with wide shoulders and a high collar, and is gazing serenely off into the distance. The lighting in the whole scene is golden because the sun has just come up.

I finished the very last episode of Babylon 5 tonight, got me right in the feels. I really enjoyed the show, though the last season wasn't overall as good as the previous four. Also, no Ivanova in season 5, she was my favourite character. 😤 At least she showed up again in the finale though, and I understand why season 5 was like that (apparently they thought they weren't going to be renewed at the end of season 4, hence the last episode of that season, and then suddenly they were). Definitely a very solid contender in the 90s sci-fi field.

Next up I think I'm going to watch the Murderbot Diaries show, I've been reading the books on my iPad thanks to a Humble Bundle a while back and thoroughly enjoyed them enough to have ordered the physical books for my birthday next month. Then after that I reckon I'll get back onto my Stargate SG-1 watch-through, where I'm up to season 4.

screenshot babylon 5

Posted on 30 March 2026, 19:57

A screenshot showing a cavernous Imperial hanger, all stark black and white. It's taken from the back of the hanger looking out through the forcefield into an entrance tunnel, and across the other side of the tunnel is another hanger with two of the Imperial shuttlecraft sitting with their wings up. On the ground is a large fairly grey flat ship (the main character's one), along with some parked TIE Fighters to the left, various mechanical bits and bobs scattered around.

Another screenshot of an Imperial hanger, but this one looks a lot more menacing because it's a TIE Fighter bay. There are several TIE fighters on the ground being repaired or otherwise inspected, and four of them being moved around above the ground by cranes that are attached to tracks hanging down towards the ceiling. In the middle of the floor there's a huge hole where a lift clearly comes up, and it would be just the right fit for a TIE Fighter. There are cables and storage containers and all sorts of bits and pieces hanging around, and at the right you can just see two tiny Stormtroopers that really show the scale of the space (it's BIG).

The final screenshot, this one is utterly different in feel to the first two. Instead of stark clean black and white of the Imperial fuelling facility, it's inside a wreck of an Old Republic cruiser, some sort of room with banks of control panels and a window at the far right. The walls are rusty and the entire roof has caved in and there's a big hole where the sunshine is shining in, and the floor of the room is covered in red sand, with various grasses growing at various points, particularly where the sun is coming in.

I am continuing to thoroughly enjoy Star Wars: Outlaws! I've been doing jobs for various crime syndicates, have snuck onto an Imperial fuelling station, and most recently salvaged a nav computer from an Old Republic shipwreck. Just before I turned everything off tonight I finally landed on the planet Kijimi, which is from the look of things a cold and barren ice world so it's going to be a good change from the harsh dry winds and heat of Toshara.

I really like how they portray the main character Kay, she's not a total badass, she's just someone who's trying to survive and who keeps getting the short end of the stick. They did a really good job with the voice actor as well, she's always got an underlying not-quite-sure quality like she's trying to bluff her way through things but isn't fully confident.

screenshot gaming xbox star wars outlaws

Posted on 17 March 2026, 22:34

A screenshot of a section of the "food court" in Star Wars: Outlaws, in the middle is what looks like a very small bar with stools except it's serving food made by a tall cylindrical droid, and scattered about in front are tables with people sitting at them with plates of food and drink in front of them. There a few aliens and humans standing around having conversations as well. The whole scene is indoors with huge cylindrical range pillars rising up, and all the walls are grimy-looking grey/brown metal.

Another screenshot looking into one of the food vendors' shops, this one has a bunch of enormous saucepans with some sort of food in them sitting at the back of shop, bottles and pans on shelves on the wall, and there is a human sitting down on a cylindrical container looking at whatever the Star Wars equivalent of an iPad is, and a Twi'lek crouched down stirring a pot of red sauce of some sort. The whole area is quite small and looks smoky.

Another screenshot, this one is of a smallish shop that's absolutely jam-packed with random bits and bobs on every available horizontal service and some spilling down onto the floor. It looks like it might be a pawn shop, and there are two deactivated protocol droids standing at the right. The shop owner is at the far end and has green skin and is behind the counter, and there are two aliens in conversation at the left.

Another screenshot, this looks almost like a street marketplace you'd see in our world, with vendors having their little stalls with baskets with piles of things in them. The walls around the edges of the marketplace are grimy-looking metal, there are various aliens both as vendors and buying things, and two Imperial Stormtroopers in the middle of walking around keeping an eye on things. The whole scene is lit in a garish reddy/orange colour.

I'm finally doing some gaming on the Xbox after many many months! I'd picked up Star Wars: Outlaws on super-special a while ago but hadn't actually played it yet so I figured I'd give it a go.

I've only been playing for a few hours and am only on the second planet, but they've done such a good job capturing the feel of the ordinary, grimy side of the Star Wars universe. I've been tootling around the Market District in Mirogana and I love all the little details they've added, there's a food court with people sitting around eating or ordering food from the vendors, there are little hole-in-the-wall vendors making food or selling or repairing electronics or other things, random droids wandering around, and then the underlying menace from seeing Stormtroopers marching about on patrol too. As well as people speaking Basic, you've also got the various alien languages as well, most of them exactly how they'd sound from the movies, and the whole atmosphere is so well-done.

screenshot gaming xbox star wars outlaws

Posted on 7 March 2026, 14:55

A multi-display screenshot of my current music production setup. On the main display at the top right is Logic Pro's main window showing the various tracks that have been recorded (or MIDI notes put onto) and the main channel window showing each track and the volume faders along with the various effects that are applied to them. At the left is my internal MacBook Pro display showing Superior Drummer 3's frankly ridiculous "Mixer" tab where you can individually mix and EQ and compress and do basically everything to each separate drum kit piece (kick, snare, hi-hats, even overhead microphones for goodness' sake). Then lastly at the bottom left is my little 13" portable display with four Channel EQ windows showing a visual representation of the frequencies in each track and how they've been adjusted.

I'm working on another song using some of the EZKeys Dark Industrial expansion sounds and MIDI files I bought last month and have discovered just how much of a difference adding EQs to your tracks can change the sound. This feels like a potentially very deep rabbit hole to go down. :ohno:

music screenshot logic pro macos

Posted on 7 February 2026, 12:51

A screenshot of the "King of VHS" app on the iPad. It's basically a screen full of nothing but knobs and dials, with a very 80s-looking feel to them.

I've discovered that there are a bunch of synth apps available on the iPad, and they work magnificently with my little Arturia MiniLab 3 keyboard. This may be a very large rabbit hole I'm about to fall down. :ohno:

(At least I'm not getting into actual physical synths though.)

music screenshot midi keyboard

Posted on 4 November 2025, 21:15

A screenshot of the "Course Complete" achievement you get when you finish the course. It looks like a round badge, it's black with flames in the background, and says in a very angular metal-looking font "course complete" on it.

Almost exactly two and a half years since I got my bass guitar, I have finished the BassBuzz "Beginner to Badass" course! 🎉 I probably would have finished it a bit faster but a) I have too many other hobbies, and b) around the start of this year they released an entirely revamped course with better videos and lessons so I decided to start totally afresh from the beginning.

I still wouldn't say I'm anywhere near a good bass player (I feel like an utter noob when playing with people at work), but obviously I'm going to keep practicing, and there was a final video in the course giving suggestions on a bunch of lessons to go through and check off to ensure you can really smash them, plus some tips on where to go next and how to build a practice routine. There are also some "masterclass" videos that introduce playing with a pick, slap bass, and a few other things that I'll make my way through too.

screenshot bass guitar

Posted on 17 October 2025, 21:40

A screenshot of the overview of Deep Space Nine as shown in the media software Jellyfin. The artwork at the left has the head and shoulders of the character Benjamin Sisko, a handsome Black man with a bald head and neatly trimmed goatee, in front of a starry background. In front of him is Deep Space Nine itself, a space station that looks like a ring with another smaller ring in the middle, connected together with three equidistant arms, and three curved fang-like structures coming out above and below the outer ring which give the station a bit of a predatory look. In front of that is the U.S.S. Defiant, a compact warship that looks basically like a chonky circle with glowing red engines on the side and a section poking out in front. The text summary of the show says "When the Cardassian occupation of Bajor ended in 2369, the mining space-station Terok Nor was left abandoned, its systems ripped out. By invitation of the provisional Bajoran government, Starfleet stepped in to oversee the rebuilding and day-to-day operations of the newly christened Deep Space Nine. DS9 soon became a center of travel and commerce thanks to a newly found stable wormhole leading to the largely unexplored Gamma Quadrant."

And now nearly 122GB later, we have the entirety of Deep Space Nine encoded to H.264! 🥳 I played around a bit with H.265 but it only saved about 100MB or so an episode and took a fair bit longer to encode so I decided it wasn't worth it. I'm surprised at how good the resulting quality is given the source material is just standard definition, even when viewed on our 55" TV.

Speaking of encoding times, I'm also converting the special features as well and I don't know what it is about them compared to the actual episodes but they're taking an eternity. One of the features for Season 1 is 18 minutes long and it took 26 minutes to encode, versus an average of probably 8-10 minutes for an entire 45-minute episode of the show! The file size isn't even abnormally large, it's just taking ages. Having skipped through to see what was in it, there are a number of interviews from like 1992 that look like they were being played back through VHS so I wonder if it's just all the artifacts in those segments that's causing Handbrake to have to work a lot harder...

screenshot star trek: deep space nine

Posted on 23 September 2025, 18:50

A screenshot of the original Doom, looking pixellated by today's standards but otherwise okay. It's got the hand holding the pistol in the middle of the screen, a brown kind of military/sci-fi wall at the left with a VERY-obviously 2D sprite barrel of green goo, the section in front of the wall has some steps and that section is lit up, but in the distance it's all dark and hard to make out, but you can see some computer screens and what look like control panels up near the roof. No idea why they're up there because you couldn't use them!

A screenshot of Dark Forces, it's EXTREMELY pixellated, much more so than Doom because I've turned it back to the original software rendering. The character is holding one of the black blaster rifles that stormtroopers use, the floor in front of me is dark grey cobbles and there's a gap in the floor you can't see down, then past that on the other side are white walls that look like they've been in a war zone, with black blaster marks on them. The whole thing is quite dark because the power is off at this point. The sky has delightfully pixel-art-looking mountains with a purple sky that's either just after sunset or just before sunrise.

A screenshot of Doom 64, this is a fair bit less pixellated than the other two screenshots, but all the textures have that early 3D rendering "smooth" look to them. The view is looking into a hallway with rusted metal-looking walls and in the centre is a glowing orange floor panel. The whole scene is lit in orange/red light that's coming from that panel.

I've been thoroughly enjoying going back to my gaming roots recently, with the remasters of Doom, Dark Forces, and Doom 64 on the Xbox!

The first screenshot here is the original Doom, which we got a demo of with our Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, and my parents very much disapproved of the amount of gore in it. We also got the demo of Dark Forces on that same demo disc, which was just the first level, but I was so keen to get the full game that I begged my parents and promised I'd even delete Doom and not play it anymore if they got me the full game for Christmas. 😛

The second screenshot is very early on in the second level of Dark Forces, in all its software-rendered pixellated glory, and I can still remember sitting in my pyjamas on Christmas morning playing it with a sense of awe at all the new levels for me to explore. I think my favourite level was later in the game, Nar Shaddaa, the sheer vertical scale of it really grabbed my imagination.

And then lastly we have Doom 64, bought a handful of years after Dark Forces, and because it was on the Nintendo 64 and everything was 3D now, everything also had to have coloured lighting everywhere. It's hilarious how overdone it was looking back at it now, sort of like looking back at the pinstripes in early Mac OS X. Games now have lighting that makes sense contextually, you don't really notice it that much because it's realistic, but this was all "GONNA BE RED, LET'S HAVE SOME BLUE HERE, AND SOME GREEN THERE." 😂

And man, playing these I'd forgotten about the total lack of any sort of hand-holding you got when trying to figure out where you needed to go. There was an overhead map but absolutely none of these objective markers or UI indicators of direction. If you get lost, tough shit, you're going to have to wander until you figure it out!

screenshot gaming retro things xbox dark forces doom

Posted on 19 August 2025, 21:54