Category: Games

a few items

Mo-no-ny-mous
I mean Shakira
Mo-no-ny-mous
And also Cher
Mo-no-ny-mous
Adele and Bono
and Plato, & Cato,
Colette – and don’t forget Voltaire

(This above for mOm, I sang it to her the other day and she laughed so I thought I’d write it down for her.)

Made fruit salad for the meal yesterday. Last I saw, leaving their house, Paul was going to eat the rest before anyone got seconds. It was that good. And candidly, given that he daily complains about how hard his poops are, who minds that he inhales some food value with his roughage.

It consisted of pieces of melon, blueberries, strawberries, mangoes, the best fucking Bartlett pears I ever et, and oranges. The dressing which is from a recipe I got online, I’m not smart enough to invent it, and it’s for those who can eat dairy: a cup and a half of 10%BF Greek yogurt, three tablespoons of maple syrup and half a capful of vanilla. WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS how nommy it is, and like I said I would have taken home leftovers if there had been any. The mouth feel, good god yall.

Oreo sat on my shoulders a good long while and purred hard in my ear.

I PLAYED A BOARD GAME WITH THREE QUARTERS OF MY DESCENDANTS YESTERDAY. It was Alex’s idea and I had so much fun. Hasbro’s latest version of Clue, if you need to know.

Dax changed the oil in my car. I asked him anxiously from the back deck if the oil was very dirty and he swilled it around in the container and considered the matter and said, ‘Yes’ so dryly that I burst out laughing. I owe him forty bucks for the filter and the oil so I’ll be heading out to drop it off sometime today. Perhaps I’ll combine it with a trip to Peggy’s to ditch that weird fretless bass ukulele.

Made soup yesterday. Started with a litre of unsalted Campbell’s chicken stock, added organic ramen (so damn good), chopped carrots, mushrooms, baby bok choi, a little tiny dab of veggie soup base, a splish of soy sauce. Today or tomorrow I am going to attempt Instant Pot (did you know the parent company is going out of business thanks to asset stripping? Capitalism HOW YOU SUCK) red beans and rice. I may bake up some chicken breasts and taters since the weather seems to be veering off into ‘June-uary’ temperatures.

Thunder and lightning two days ago. Not usual for these parts. We talked about the weather a lot yesterday.

Ryker was just down for his nap and Alex kissed his head AND WOKE HIM UP. He was down for most of the meal and the board game but since he’d gotten no other nap that day and was up at 6:30 Katie was SPARE while Ryker ran around the house terrorizing everything he could and parroting everything his mother said. WITH HER INTONATION. He’s got dozens and dozens of words, some clear enough that people who don’t live with him can understand him. Keith was like that, pristine pronunciation from the git. But Ryker is DIFFERENT. He is stronger, braver (yeah, like no sense of self preservation) smarter, faster, funnier, more able to understand what the adults around him are saying, more able to self-soothe, more durable – he took hits yesterday that would have had me bawling and just walked it off – picking up language so fast. Mike the father brought him back with a pinch bruise on his leg from a recliner, apologetic af, and Katie wasn’t bothered. What can you do? He’s not Alex, or Keith, who conducted themselves from a very early age knowing that the world can bite ya. I told her they should promise each other ten bucks and hand it to whichever of them DOESN’T have to take him to hospital with a broken bone first. You should have seen Katie rubbing her face as she contemplated how many TIMES she’ll likely have to take him to hospital. Like the tshirt said, today we keep the tiny human alive. Except he’s NOT tiny, he can open and shut doors with the handle.

everything about the visit is overshadowed by the fact that Alex is crying every day about how he can no longer go to second street school because his mother can’t afford to live in the catchment area. And the landlord fucked her over by not giving her a duly completed eviction notice so she can’t move up the BC housing list. This world is a horrible place for my children right now and I am helpless.

Over 500 words on TB yesterday. Richie and Blossom have finally met.

VR headset and Alex

HE IS SO CHUFFED. His mouth keeps falling open in wonderment and discovery. BUT

setting up a meta account fucking near killed me I am now officially pissed and I can’t ‘go forward’ from the groundhog day set up experience.

Gruncle Jeff has definitely definitely won the cool relative sweepstakes for the week. ALEX has found his way to youtube. Now he says TIRED NOW BACK TO PEGGLE (an xbox 360 game)

Jeff couldn’t book for a Sunday return thanks to the MURDER ON THE BC FERRY which turns out to be not a murder but a miscount of clients and who knows where he ended up. (walked off the ferry abandoning his car? wht the heck) so Jeff’s now coming back Monday. Sigh. Buster will be so so so very glad to see him.

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

look at my STRUGGLE

IMAGINE having three out of five letters correct three times in a row, I thought I was gonna run amok.

Doctor appointment on zoom equivalent today. They send me four reminder notices, I guess somebody finally noticed I have ADD.

The shit on twitter about Ottawa is melting my mind. There are so many cops on the ground right now, from all over Ontario. The antivaxxers LOCKED THE DOORS ON A BUILDING AND SET FIRE TO IT.

Not much writing. Not much of anything. I was so exhausted and braindead yesterday I slept for most of it. Today I’ll do a couple of loads of laundry and finish that letter to auntie Mary, it’s been months.

In our desperate attempt to find a lighthearted show to watch (everything is SO FARKING GRIMDARK DESE DAYS) I prompted Jeff to find Leverage; it’s the same folks who did the Librarians (John Rogers, whom I followed on twitter for a while as He Is Funny but also a little too centrist for my taste LOL like I can expect a showrunner to be an anarchist). Anyway, it is a light hearted show and it’s like Mission Impossible crashed Burn Notice’s party while scraping content from White Collar. The characters are all likeable and the writing is sharp without being brittle, and Timothy Hutton is way better in it than I was expecting (subtle, reactive, sweet, it’s ver’ nice). Christian Kane continues to be every fangirl’s second favourite bi icon….

 

revenge, revenge, revenge of uninten-ded consequeces

Does anyone else think that this has not been thought through? I read the article and thought man, WHO WANTS TO HAVE THREE FUCKING KIDS AND THE STATE TELLING YOU THEY CAN’T HAVE SCREEN TIME WHEN THEY’RE ALL YELLING AT YOU AND EACH OTHER.

Fuck the CPC, man, what a bunch of dolts.

For the bit rot, quoted from SCMP Published: 6:53pm, 30 Aug, 2021, writer Josh Ye:

China limits gaming time for under-18s to one hour a day on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays

China’s top watchdog for gaming and other forms of online media has formally issued the rules to combat video games addiction among teenagers

The NPPA said video gaming companies are the main entities responsible for stopping children from becoming addicted to games

Beijing has issued a new rule limiting the gaming time for players aged under 18 to between 8pm and 9pm only on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays, marking the country’s most stringent measure yet to tackle video gaming addiction among young people.

The National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), China’s top watchdog for gaming and other forms of online media, formally issued the rules to combat gaming addiction among teenagers, according to a report by state media outlet Xinhua.

everything’s got spin, and the spin is in

TFW you want to boast on social media about a gaming accomplishment — but the real point is that it would be virtually impossible for someone with early onset dementia to do what you just did. I broke 5 minutes, I broke 5 minutes AND took 20 seconds off my most recent record. yay Sherlock, my favourite puzzle game for MORE THAN 30 YEARS.

I was supposed to write somebody a letter today…. I’m going to clutch the negligibly small sore spot on my flu shot arm and plead that all I want to do today is vote. Also, there are leftovers, I got mild peri sauce Barcelo chicken yesterday and I found it absolutely delicious.

Various physical signs in my body indicate that my liver is much happier with me eating less carbs and sugar. I still don’t have any way to check my blood sugar. A diabetic friend is really happy with her implant (she’s lost weight in a healthy way, she has needle-like accuracy on her sugars) but I’m hoping to turn the boat around still, so we’ll see.

I reviewed my schedule of habits to develop and I think for the next week I’m going to concentrate on drinking enough water. So every time the clock shows a multiple of three, I should drink a third of a litre of water at minimum, and make less than half my daily liquid consumption tea. Let’s see if I can get this habit established! I’m very well established with an evening routine, so I’m happy about that, and I’ve also stopped looking at the computer at bedtime, which means sleep starts faster and I’m not doomscrolling right before bed.

In the morning, the wifi doesn’t talk to my laptop from 4 am to 7 am. I get much more done in terms of writing, editing and letter writing now during that period since I’m not making myself unpleasant on twitter the entire time. That’s usually the time I mail the letter, if I leave the house for that purpose.

Murder hornet found in BC. How jolly.

Moose eating pumpkin. 

Okay I’ll be thinking about this one for a while:

Image

text accompanying a ‘Lower Decks’ graphic: Star Fleet Academy should not be in SF. There’s no canonical indication that the land was ever returned and military school on stolen land is a military occupation.

Me at Goldie Lake

Allegra at Goldie Lake October 2020

Photo credit Paul Caspell

Jesus Christ in mitten strings, at this point if a cis man tells me he’s into Warhammer I’m going to assume that glum darkness with misogyny is his emotional colour palette and may I also mention that I prefer it when people show, rather than threaten to show, their reasoning skills. I just read through one of the most ghastly misogynistic piece of shit threads ever, and now the whole game has a stench I must avoid.

service plus party

Paul and I were very moved by the service for David Hamilton, who in death seems even more quietly mythic than he was in life.  A genuine, humble, intelligent, thoughtful, listening kind of man, with music in his very soul, the eulogies were funny and moving and real and the comments by his daughters-in-law particularly stood out as coming from two very different women, but uttering the same grateful praise.

We spent a lot of time catching up (I refused to look at my watch.)

So we were late to the restaurant, but it all came out okay.

Then back here.  We played Cards Against Humanity and had so much fun.  I haven’t heard Jeff laugh that hard in company since high school.  Both of us laughed until we were leaking, and at the point when we thought our ribs couldn’t take it any more we’d start laughing again.  Keith played games master. Also in attendance Cassidy, Mike (birthday lad), Joe and his gf, whom I’ve probably been introduced to four times but whose name I cannot remember, Brian and Chari, Paul of course.  Paul had the advantage, with Keith, Mike and Cassidy, of having played it before, and he came up with some combos that were hilariously unprintable.  I won a round with the best and simplest two card combo.

“For my next trick I will try to pull HOPE out of MY SEX LIFE.” Keith was the judge that round, ya shoulda seen his face.

I also won a round with “Dick Fingers”.  Since there was also “Five Dollar Foot Longs” coming up as a card in that round the group immediately came up with a  band name of Dick Fingers and his Five Dollar Foot Longs.

Yes, we had fun.

Jeff wore his Stargate “No Place Like Home” hoodie, squee.

I don’t even know who won and I don’t care.  It wasn’t the point.

Keith noted that you aren’t supposed to play it with family members but we managed all that quite nicely.  It’s an extremely rude game, and you may learn, as Jeff remarked, things you really didn’t want to.

Thank you to Jeff for getting the pinballs going – Joe and gf, who is apparently a pinball enthusiast from way back, went downstairs and made pinging noises for at least an hour and then dropped into the middle of the CaH game.

Around 9:30 I realized I could no longer stay upright so I went to bed.  Also, darkness equals bugs.

Thank you to all the beautiful people, friends and Beaconites, who made it such a perfect, and perfectly exhausting day.  Now I can’t sleep.

 

Falling and dying (in Dark Souls II) 4 of 50

Falling and dying x 3
In Dark Souls II

I've only ever kibitzed
when my brother played this game
The NPCs pee on his leg
and call it gentle rain
And soon enough the gravity
will trigger this refrain

Falling and dying x 3
In Dark Souls II

He stepped into a box one day
and he emerged a girl
He thought he'd give the mincing walk
they gave her a short whirl
But really he would rather be
an armoured flying squirrel!

Falling and dying x 3
In Dark Souls II

bridge:
Typos in the weapons descriptions
No way to pause it to pee
Boss fights that come out of nowhere
You'd better be ready to be...

Falling and dying x 3
In Dark Souls II

As fickle as the weather 
in Vancouver and as nice
Merchants you need badly who
will only show up twice
They overseason everything 
but only use one spice

Falling and dying x 3
In Dark Souls II

Spoken... Man I'm sure glad I'm not the one who has to keep the torches lit in that place...

Ah, me

Some dudebro posting under a social justice moniker on twitter just told me that douchebag is not a gendered slur.  Do you know what it feels like, protecting Stephen Harper from gendered slurs?  I feel…. fucking weirded out, 0 humans!

Of course douchebag is a gendered slur.  Men don’t douche.  (Women shouldn’t either, but that is a bottle of cultural worms I’m not prepared to uncork at the moment cause then we get into the whole stinky hoo-ha thing… just, no.)

Anyway, Stephen Harper is a REAL man.  Where REAL stands for Reliably Evangelistic Authoritarian Leader.

So after he (obliviously he) tells me that douchebag is not a gendered slur, I answered thusly,

Are you implying (along with coconuts migrating) that men douche?  Cause, damn, dog, that’s some scary shit.

I think it’s time to turn off the social justice firehose for today.

Manuel Noriega – Ol’ Pineapple Face himself  – is suing a gaming company for unauthorized use of his image.

In the words of John Caspell:

bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha aaaa!