OrbitalMartian

What Makes Orbital Happy?

📆 20 Jul 2025 19:30 UTC +01:00 📕 814 words ⏳ 6 min. 🏷️ #Rambling

I often write about my random thoughts and experiences throughout my online life, but I never really write much about myself. So today, I want to write about what makes me happy both in my online life and my offline life.

So, let’s get started. First, one of my favourite thing to do is gaming. I love playing video games, mostly simulators but I also play a few first person shooters and a couple of other genres.

My most played game on Steam is Team Fortress 2. I have spent over 100 hours playing TF2, most of the time playing on community servers with my brother.I do also play a couple of games off Steam, Minecraft and FlightGear. I spent a good 6 or so months playing Minecraft at every opportunity, I haven’t played it as much recently, but I still enjoy hopping on every now and then for a relaxing session. I spend majority of my gaming time flying a wide variety of aircraft in FlightGear, the free and open source flight simulator

FlightGear has been my go to game pretty much every time I game for over a year now. I fly a lot of different aircraft, from general aviation planes to helicopters, fast jets to airliners. I spend a lot of time in the simulator.

My next top played game is Flashing Lights, a police, fire and EMS simulator. I have spent a good amount of hours playing this and absolutely love it.

More recently, I have been playing a lot of Stormworks: Build and Rescue (with the Search and Destroy DLC) and BeamNG Drive. I have a few other games that I really want to play some more of - namely Stardew Valley and Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Another thing I do for fun is writing. I have a very creative mind, meaning that I can come up with a lot of fantasy, sci-fi scenes, and stories, that I often write down. I haven’t written nearly enough fiction, but I have got a couple of projects in the works.

My mini story series, A Race Against Time, has 5 episodes, most of which I wrote last November during Writing Month. With a 6th episode in the works (taking my time with it, hoping to improve the quality a lot).

My main project is a personal one that I am not sharing any of the writing at all. It’s all being done in private and may one day be published, I haven’t got that far yet. This is called Project Aurora IV, a sci-fi adventure novel, currently I have 446 words written and I have neglected my writing for the last few months; which I really ought to change.

The final big thing that makes me happy is reading. I spend a lot of time reading books, I keep track of this on both Bookwyrm and Storygraph. I also have a Google Sheets spreadsheet with my paperback book tracking on, just makes it a bit more convenient for quickly noting what page I’m on to then transfer to my online sources. I update Storygraph more frequently but write more about what I’ve read on Bookwyrm.

My current reads are:

• Shadows Bear No Names by O. Canatan - a new author to me and a great one from what I’ve read so far. I’m currently on page 180 (40% through the book).
• War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells - Back at the end of June, I joined a book club, started by Matt from The Linux Cast, where this is the first book of the month. Really enjoying this book, I’m ~37% through it, I’ve been reading this on my Kindle, that I swindled back at Christmas with a free ebook of it (legally acquired of course).

I also read a ton of blogs, mostly through my RSS reader, but I occasionally read random blosts that are shared on social networks (Fediverse or Discord servers - or that one Signal group chat that gets 400 notifications when offline).

This was a fun blost to write, thinking about all the things that make me happy has made me happy. I hope to get more posts written in the next week or so, I am away on holiday next week so I may be quieter (than I am now, so it may not even be noticeable), hopefully this year I won’t have an epiphany to change my name again - I won’t, I promise, it’s too much hassle for me too.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this blost. Let me know what makes you happy in the comments (either by email or by the Fediverse). Byeeee!!!

https://fosstodon.org/@orbitalmartian/114887091589006975