I’m a huge fan of the UK Sonic the Comic, and I’ve been enjoying Sonic the Comic the podcast a lot too.
That said it’s been incredibly difficult to find a scan of the Knuckles knockout special (which I was not fortunate enough to own as a child).
People on Ebay are charging way too much for this special edition comic, so here are the scans of a copy I recently acquired for every Sonic fan to enjoy. Download links are below too.
We’re getting an air source heat pump installed at the moment. It’s something that we’ve been thinking about doing for about a year now but when our ancient boiler finally died this spring we decided to make the leap to heating our home in a cleaner way.
The main thing that put me off doing it sooner was the vast amount of unknowns about what heating with a heat pump would actually mean in practice. So I want to use this as an opportunity to learn as I go and crucially pass on what I’ve learnt to others who are heat pump curious.
I want to know all the little things that matters day to day, like what it looks and sounds like, how you service it, and what the controls are like and how long it takes to get used to the different way of heating your home.
My information is UK-centric, but those of you outside of the UK may still get some benefit.
I’m not going to talk about how heat pumps work because there’s plenty of other advice about this online.
Well, yes they are. Ours is going to cost about £12,000, but at time of install we get £5,000 up front in subsidies from the UK Government for not choosing another gas boiler. This is organised through our installer.
To look at it another way though. I work from home now, as I have a fully remote job I never go to an office. So the largest part of my carbon footprint is now heating my home. Previously my rail season ticket was about £3,300 a year (not including price increases), so two years of not travelling by train has paid for our heat pump.
What an indictment on the state of the British rail network…
Ground source heat pumps cost more, and need a big garden or space around the property to dig down into which we do not have. So I can only share my experience with an air to water heat pump.
I’m doing this to reduce my carbon footprint. The upgrade we’re going for makes more economic sense for someone not on mains gas.
We’ve been advised that our monthly energy costs should be comparable to our old gas boiler. Electricity usage is more expensive than gas in the UK, but the heat pump generates up to 3 times the energy for the amount of energy used to create it. So it should work out about the same, or slightly less than what we pay now. I used to work for two green energy companies and doing the maths, this checks out. It will be more expensive than quoted, but this is because the energy prices are going up so much generally.
Given the economics of the world too, I’m primarily also doing this to reduce my gas usage. It will reduce the local pollution in our area. Plus more electricity and a greener grid is key to energy independence.
Energy prices are only going to go up from here on in as prices in the UK are tied to the energy price cap which is due to go up this autumn, so it’s going to be harder for me to measure the financial benefits in the short term, but I’ll collect all the data I can.
How well a heat pump works is based on your home and things like its physical footprint, how big it is, the number of rooms you have and how much heat loss you have.
Heat pumps use ambient heat, which means setting the temperature for it to come on and leaving it on (even overnight) rather than boosting up the heating as and when you need it. The carbon cost is a lot lower than having the heating on and off as with gas, but that is going to take some getting used to. I’m so used to turning something off when it’s not needed, but that’s simply going to make the heat pump less efficient at what it does.
Some people say heat pumps don’t heat as well, but they heat your home different to something like oil and gas, you can’t boost the temperature up really quickly, and that leads people to say they’re not as warm, when it simply works differently, and takes some adjustment.
They make some noise outside so it’s worth having a chat to your neighbours about it, but this should only be an issue in the winter when it’s working harder. It’ll be quieter than the road at the back of our house at up to 35 decibels. I am looking forward to hearing this in the real world.
This heat pump itself will last about 20 years, and I expect the costs will come down over time, a new unit will be much cheaper by the time we need one again, and the pipework, electrics and radiators will already be upgraded for this purpose by our initial install.
Heat pumps don’t improve your rating on your EPC rating as far as I can tell which seems a bit of an oversight, but clearly they do improve the energy impact of your home, so I hope this will be addressed.
There are no heat pump tariffs in the UK at the moment. Seems to me that we should be charging people less for electricity and more for gas due to its lower carbon cost. Some suppliers are trialing heat pump specific tariffs in the UK, and there are smart tariffs (which charge you less when there’s less strain on the grid). Reducing the unit rates for electricity or having cheaper rates to use in the summer would encourage more people to make the leap.
Retrofitting insulation – our EPC advises that we could improve our energy rating by at least one letter by looking at this. it’s on the list, but is potentially more expensive than the heat pump and more intrusive in terms of the work needed (scaffolding etc) and changes the outside appearance of our house. We have few cavity walls in our home, so this or internal insulation are our only options I believe.
We might consider putting some solar panels on the roof, but we don’t have a lot of feasible roof space that would make this viable, however it’s more of an appealing prospect with a heat pump (we’d use it primarily to heat water).
We will remove our gas hob in the future, as we’ll only be paying the standing charge for gas to cook with (we have an electric oven).
What happens during installation, and more pictures.
I’m very touched that a handful of people and some good friends reached out in the past year to say how much they missed Pioneer Project and if it’s something that I’d be interested in updating again.
It’s been nine years since I last wrote something here, and five since I parked writing about chronic illness, so it’s time for a bit of a life update.
This used to be a website about video game lore and analysis, and it still is… kind of. I’m going to be expanding my focus for this site to include user experience topics (that I sort of did before with games) and sustainability topics.
I think it’s really important that I try to explain how I can be kind to the planet, enjoy video games and be a digital designer, it’s all a bit of a contradiction, but something I hope to explore here.
So here’s what’s happened in my life since 2013 (in no particular order).
I’ve been studying Japanese daily for around six years now. With a focus on reading. I’m entering the beginner/intermediate stage. I keep a paper diary in Japanese and I’ve started playing games in Japanese too. Here’s a list of the Japanese resources I use.
I started Japanese after travelling to Japan twice. It’s been so rewarding to understand Japanese media in the original language used. I’ve enjoyed playing Final Fantasy VII, Shenmue and the original Legend of Zelda in Japanese and I hope to start branching out to games like 僕の夏休み for Japanese language practice. Something I hope to talk about more as it’s amazing how much of the personality of characters are lost during localisation, it’s nice to take games apart – back to their original contexts.
I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia around my birthday in 2017. I’ve no doubt developed it since I’ve lived with endometriosis for so long and it’s started to put my body on red alert when it comes to pain. So since then life has meant living with whole body pain, and its knock on to gaming is that I now have a lot of hand pain.
This has meant I use the accessibility modes in games now and I rely on them in some cases as I have a motor impairment when it comes to holding buttons for a long time, or pressing the same button or trigger repeatedly or very quickly. I’ve actually had to give up some games for this reason so I might talk about that some more.
I manage my daily pain levels by using exercise and pain management. I still only use a bicycle as a method of transport and since 2020 I’ve started running, and I now run 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) a week for pain relief.
I worked in digital project management for many years, and for around the last five or so I’ve pivoted to user experience. I now work as a UX/UI designer creating designs for websites and apps. As a key part of that I run user research and usability testing on digital products to understand the problems that people have with using them and use this data to make them easier to use.
I dipped into the user experience of games a little bit on the previous version of this site, so it’s something I hope to do a bit more now I do something similar for a living.
I also work from home on a permanent basis and because I am in a comfortable working location I have a great quality of life when it comes to working with pain, so that’s freed up a bit of time for writing again.
In 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Dominica. As a mixed-race person this is where the majority of my family live, and we had a heart-wrenching two weeks of not knowing whether or not all our family were alive or not. Hours spent making lists of where we thought friends and family might be, listening to reports from ham radio. Sleepless nights and sickness from worry.
The most disturbing thing was the silence online. All infrastructure was broken, no mobile networks, no internet, no power, no water, no airports, no post, no working ports, no shops, no banks, no hospitals. Nothing online, nothing on social media, nothing on the news (past the first reports it happened).
With no wowing social media videos to share the worlds media quickly moved on, and Dominica was dark from space. It was awful. Even when we found out they were alive, there were long weeks for them without fresh water and food, the risk of disease, the stench of trapped dead bodies.
It’s taken years to get things back to where they were. Even now things aren’t normal, many are still rebuilding, and as I spent days on the phone trying to migrate my family to other, safer islands I thought about the risk of these sort of hurricanes becoming stronger and more furious. People in the Caribbean can normally do hurricanes in their sleep, but how much longer will it be until these island nations are made inhabitable?
I’ve always been climate-focused. However three years ago I started actively getting involved in climate activism and protests. Since then I’ve protested at COP26 in Glasgow, at G7 in Cornwall and up and down the UK. I’ve done literally everything I can to open people’s eyes to impact of our lives on those in the global south.
Personally as well to further improve. I’ve become zero waste (nothing sent to landfill) and I’m a lifetime member of the vegan society. Coincidentally both of these ideals are not too dissimilar to how my family originally lived in poverty in the Caribbean (only one or two generations ago).
To conclude on a happier note. I’ve developed quite an interest in horror films. In fact in a way those films shielded me a little from the real-life horrors my family experienced first hand, they were a comfort and cathartic in a way.
Horror fans remain the nicest, and sweetest community of people that I’ve come to know. This is a fairly new hobby for me, but I’ve since attended Frightfest in London twice, and I regularly watch new and classic horror. My favourite sub genres are folk horror and ghost stories. You can read about what I am watching on Letterboxd if you’re interested.
So that’s a nice summary of the last few years (not including things like Covid and lockdown). Hopefully you’ll still find the new direction of this site interesting, bear with me while I find my groove again. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time.
I am a self-confessed Animal Crossing fan. I’ve played every single game since I tentatively imported the Gamecube version from America, uncertain (like many other gamers in Europe) that such a niche game (as it was then) would ever make it here.
Despite years of playing the series and considerable knowledge of what I might expect, I was certain that Animal Crossing no longer had the power to captivate me again. The only complaint I can level at the series is that it hasn’t changed too substantially from the game I first played back in 2002. I had retread that same, trite introductory tutorial so many times it had become painful to redo.
My hopes weren’t high, so I was pleasantly surprised that the game had changed enough to offer something a little newer to veterans like me. Crucially though, social media has really come into its own for this title.
The stand out feature of Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the ability to take screenshots of your game and upload instantly to the web. Animal Crossing has always been a social life sim, but it’s even more impressive now watching thousands of others progress daily together on the hashtag #ANCL.
It’s a fascinating window into others little moments of progress, and a great (largely spoiler-free way) to discover new things about the game. It’s also the perfect compliment to the cooperative nature of series, sitting alongside the ability to explore and visit other peoples towns.
I find myself watching the #ANCL hashtag when I am unable to play the game, to watch what others are doing. I suspect other people’s excitement for this title is fuelling a massive feedback loop of successive play, as we all mix together and share in our excitement of slow, but oh so satisfying progress.
It’s making the wait for each days play far more rewarding in turn, as we each start to see the subtle differences in each of our routines. I’m personally enjoying easier access to villages in other regions of the world. Watching another person’s town grow and evolve in fascination in the dusk of their game as I sit in the bright morning of mine. I enjoy hearing about what other people find enjoyable about the title. Aspects I don’t spend much time on. Someone else’s fascination with collecting Gyroids, another’s love of gardening. The happy timesink of designing more and more elaborate patterns to share.
Being able to see these moments of others fascination in picture form has created a new lease of life in this occasionally tired game. As I watch others stumble into detail of the game that I hadn’t yet discovered.
This sort of sharing encourages more online play – spotting an image of someone in a pear orchard, might inspire a pair to swap friend codes, as one person is eager for new fruit and another for more visitors. Personally, I’m just enjoying the window on endless Animal Crossing inspiration.
With a generation of new console hardware around the corner – why is it still so rare to take pictures of your experiences on home consoles? Features like this are crying out to be used more effectively. Achievements and trophies are nice, but isn’t the ability to take a picture of a particularly epic moment in a game just as appealing?
There’s a palpable excitement about being able to do this too, precisely because the ability for everyone to universally share pictures of their experience with a game (particularly on a handheld) is so rare it’s created a genuine buzz around a title some admitted was probably going to retread too much of the previous entries to be worth getting excited about.
I don’t even think technology can be used as an excuse why it can’t be done anymore. Neither can intellectual property concerns. Fans of Animal Crossing are doing a great job of marketing New Leaf to all of their friends more powerfully and naturally than any marketing department could ever dream of.
I am a huge Eternal Darkness fan. I have written about it extensively, and it remains one of the most beloved titles in my collection – one I return to and replay frequently. I have an in-depth knowledge and intense admiration for a title that employed a unique storytelling method and remains a memorable and engaging title each time I play it. It was this narrative detail that I appreciated about Eternal Darkness most of all, combined with the rare inclusion of a intelligent and powerful female lead character.
But the announcement of Shadow of the Eternals feels like a direct challenge to me and to those of us that admire Eternal Darkness so highly. As if after all our years of bleating for any sort of followup, we are now challenged to put our money where our mouth is.
Now the day has finally arrived, it’s left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable though.
Any crowd-sourcing attempt to generate funds relies on an element of trust. This is evident in any equivalent Kickstarter project. I’ve been asked frequently upon the announcement of Shadow of the Eternals if I trust Precursor Games with my money. Fans of Eternal Darkness are left to wonder if proof of concepts and videos are enough given the history of the team and the complexity regarding Precursor’s creation.
While I agree the episodic format does suit the narrative structure of Shadow of the Eternals in some way, the project has probably been justified in this way in order to minimise the risk and cost of development, it’s not likely to be about the narrative structure at all, without wishing to be too negative. I’m not thrilled with many examples of episodic game content, but that’s just my personal preference talking.
What I’ve seen of the game so far seems to retread the path of Eternal Darkness homage too carefully. In its demo I recognise moments from Eternal Darkness in a way that almost disappoints. Concepts, sounds and scenes lifted straight from the original game rather than building on the ideas it inspired in any measurable way. Hints of moments that look exciting or promising, brushed away by another detail too close to what I know already.
This repetition contradicts my adoration for Eternal Darkness in some ways. Some people would be content with more of the same with its spiritual successor. I worry that Shadow of the Eternals will rely too heavily on the nostalgic content of Eternal Darkness rather than the potential of how the ideas it inspired could be expanded on further.
It wasn’t so much of the psychological horror elements of Eternal Darkness that I really enjoyed (such as the much-lauded sanity effects) it was actually the unique story telling method. The idea of story as legacy, told in relay. It was all about messages and warnings passed through history from character to character. The moments that broke the fourth wall to use the player as the vessel for the narrative were also particularly dazzling.
This is why the premise of Shadow of the Eternals on paper is intriguing, even if it the idea has been a little tainted unintentionally. Interestingly, Nintendo still hold the original IP rights to Eternal Darkness, so it remains to be seen quite how much of the original title’s concepts can realistically be filtered through, and how much will have to be recreated from scratch, I imagine it’ll pan out to be a game laden with a reliance on knowing references, and fit for purpose renaming conventions, but I only have what I’ve seen so far to go on.
This whole idea boils down to brand recognition, by name checking Eternal Darkness, Precursor Games have opened up their title to the intensity of fan fervour, by distancing themselves from their previous employer they alert the attentions of those same devotees who grow quietly suspicious of a good concept soured by a lack of explanation of how this all this came to be. A very tricky combination to conquer.