Post: Decked Out
Thursday the 15th of August, 2024, for elevensies.

An odd chain of events led me to playing #flightsimulator on my #steamdeck this morning. Ultimately it kinda started with a power failure that borked an update on the deck and forced me after about four hours of effort to bite the bullet and reimage my device. It was one of those sacrifices that led me to have basically a fresh install and lots of room to install games—particularly when I’d been struggling with the motivation for a digital purge. When I first got the deck, FS2020 wouldn’t even install on it, only stream, and the lag was unbearable. But for some reason it gave me the option and since I had the room I, again, bit the bullet and endured a three hour 129GB download over wifi to get the game on there. Of course I had to crank down all the graphics settings to “medium” at best, and in many cases just off (I mean, you can’t tell on a small screen anyways) and I actually got some respectable performance out of the thing, even flying over a small city like my hometown. Now I just need to tweak the control scheme and maybe I can actually play on this thing, huh?

Post: Last Flight to Fargo
Saturday the 20th of July, 2024, deep after noon.

Another hundred or so klicks to the south east and another leg of the #flightsimulator adventure landed me at Hector? airport in Fargo. A sunny Saturday afternoon skooting across North Dakota was about as interesting as flying across Saskatchewan, save for a few extra lakes to look at. I’m really gonna need it find some cool scenery soon or this adventure is going to start to fly straight into dullsville international. My landing guidance did spice things up and gave me two terrible options for my approach, so I made my own and (as you can tell from the audio I recorded) it was a little rushed and a little rough, and it didn’t help that the joystick driver borked mid-flight so I was left flying by keyboard for part of the trip. Donk!

Post: Down to Devils Lake
Monday the 15th of July, 2024, posted at bedtime.

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.

Post: ‘Murca
Monday the 15th of July, 2024, during prime time.

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.

Post: Last Stop Until the Border
Monday the 15th of July, 2024, in the mid-afternoon.

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.

Post: The Moose Jaw is Loose
Friday the 12th of July, 2024, around lunch-ish.

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.

Post: Saska-toon-town
Thursday the 11th of July, 2024, posted at bedtime.

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…

Post: It Ain’t Big..
Thursday the 11th of July, 2024, in the late afternoon.

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.

Post: Crossing Provincial Lines
Thursday the 11th of July, 2024, in the mid-afternoon.

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.

Post: Fleeing Edmonton
Wednesday the 10th of July, 2024, at the dinner hour.

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.