Galactica

We watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica last night, and I’m pissed off. (This was the last of the sci-fi series that we had missed on TV, so we were renting it season by season.)

The seasons up until the last one were wonderful – well-written, mysterious, intricate plotlines that I was expecting to finally tie up into a neat package, and quirky characters with depth and personality. But what the hell happened in the fifth season?  I want my money back. (I’ll cut this for anyone who for some odd reason hasn’t watched it all the way through.)

teh cat drama

I am tired this morning, and plan on sleepwalking all day until 5:00pm…thank goodness it is Friday. You see, we got a kitten last night. One. Little. Tiny. Kitten.

Kit is our very old cat, a stray who decided to live with us. He doesn’t interact with other cats at all, and just wants to be left alone to sleep in the sun.

Laurence, the Lolcat, is my young cat – he’s gorgeous, but a very odd fellow. Since Kit won’t interact with him at all, he’s quite lonely. He’s terrified of anything “outside”, any changes, anything that upsets his very limited indoor world.

Cleo is the new kitten, a semi-feral barn cat kitten. We wanted someone that Laurence could play with and have as a companion…but she wants none of it. She doesn’t trust us much, either.

Last night the house was filled with hissing and tension. At 3:00 am this morning, Kit came into the bedroom and conveyed his upset and displeasure by very loudly throwing up on the off-white carpet (thanks for that – catsick stains will look just lovely). Cleo is hiding behind the TV, hissing at anything or anyone who comes near her. I passed Kit on the stairs this morning, and he swiped at my leg with all claws out (I’m obviously on his shitlist for instigating all of this).

I think I’ll go run away and live with the circus for a bit until they all work it out.  :)

Burning Out, and Beta Tests

I read a post that I quite liked today at lunch on Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog: Aion’s 3rd Beta Weekend thoughts: Class choice and whether to beta test or not. I had exactly the same thoughts while playing…although I really, really wanted to play I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to continue into the beta. I didn’t want to affect my enjoyment of playing my own characters when the game is launched, and Aion is a very, very enjoyable game.

Also, I had been doing the beta partly because of that min-maxer type-A viewpoint that wants to level as fast as possible to be ready for endgame, with the best spec. That’s why I quit playing Warcraft – I was done with raiding and everything that goes with it. I want to relax, and enjoy the ride. I don’t want to be in a guild where everyone is expected to learn new raid bosses on the PTRs to be ready to eat through content when it goes live.

I’ve been dabbling with a lot of games recently. I re-subbed to Age of Conan for a month, but cancelled within the first few days since it now ran so slowly and buggy – much worse than it did when I was originally playing it. I still dink around in Runes of Magic and Guild Wars.

I’m going back to EVE to make another attempt to find “my” game within that universe. I’d not been logging in because my games time has been so limited lately, and every time I logged in I had this “but I don’t wanna!” feeling, like I was getting something unpleasant out of the way. Silly when we talking about a game, but I think it was a result of the negative feelings I have about totally unbalanced PvP. So, back to my ship to see what trouble I can get into.

And Warhammer. I just got one of those free-time offers for ex-subscribers, and I patched everything this morning. I always did love Warhammer, I thought it was so much fun…it just didn’t work if the server population was too low. Public quests are tough to complete by yourself, and I still have yet to experience city sieges and so on. So we will see.

At the moment I am a shiftless vagabond, without a home to call my own. :)

Free Range Kids

This morning on the way into work, there was a discussion about the state of English schools – kids are no longer allowed to kick a football (soccer ball, for you Yanks), play conkers, or other traditional kid pursuits. Parents at one school were told they couldn’t use safety pins in costumes for the school play for fear of someone getting stuck with one.

And at lunch, as I logged into WordPress, there was a link to one of the posts of the day: Outrage of the Week: Mom Arrested for Letting Kids Go to the Mall.

Seriously, what the hell?  I was babysitting at twelve. I was able to go out and play or walk home from school by myself much, much younger than that. My parents didn’t suffer from a ridiculous terror that I would be blinded, maimed, or otherwise damaged by everything that I came into contact with. They didn’t fear that every adult was a potential pervert or kidnapper. We survived.

Kids are not as breakable as you might think:

I got my first horse when I was ten. Since we lived in a fairly rural area in Northern California, we rode quarterhorses, and I barrel-raced in rodeos. I had a very fast horse that my father had bought for me, and I had to keep her back to the starting line before the bell went off, as she reared and plunged. Turn her around, and she would launch herself like a rocket.

In one competition, my father was taping my run from up in the grandstand. The horse’s feet slipped out from under her on a turn, and we went down into a cloud of dust. You can see the camera’s viewpoint swing wildly as my father vaults over the wall, down into the arena. Then it steadies, and you see me standing up and getting back on the horse so I could finish my run. He taped the rest of it from where he was.

It’s always struck me as a perfect example of the respect and trust that my father had for us: he didn’t rush over and check me for broken bones, or assume that I must have a concussion…he trusted that, if I was on my feet, I could decide for myself if I was good to go or not.

I had adult friends that I hung out with as a kid and they tolerated my questions without succumbing to that pervert impluse that all adults evidently have. I placed myself in danger every time I mounted a horse or made a terror run down a snowy, wooded hill on a sled with no steering and no brakes. I had fun, I got hurt and got back up, and I’m sure I’m a better person for it.

Nowadays, if parents had done what my parents did quite often, which was to drop us all off at the library to choose books and read while they did the weekly shop, they’d probably end up in jail.

Rant over. But I do feel sorry for all the kids growing up wrapped in cotton wool, who live in a world filled with ugliness and fear. My world was a world of wonders, where we could be trusted to leave in the morning, and come back home for dinner. We rode bikes, explored scary culverts, poked dead squirrels with sticks…and we made it home for dinner every night.

Digital Paper Dolls

I levelled my Templar to 14 this weekend, and then spent some time working on my Cleric. I’m still not sure which class I’d like to level after launch – perhaps both.

Mostly, though, I made a lot of characters and deleted them, playing with faces and hair. :) I love really good character customisation, and will treat it rather like a very elaborate paper doll game.

Dravven, my Templar, is an example of why customisation is important to me – I tend not to put any effort into levelling characters who don’t “click” with me. They have to have the right face – not necessarily a pretty face, but a face that suggests a personality and a history. This one is a big, strong girl, as you would expect a tank to be. But she’s not unfeminine…in fact, she has a bit of a slutty, morning-after look to her, with dark-smudged eyes and bleached platinum hair. After I found out that I could buy her cats-eye sunglasses, she got even more attitude. (Best 14,ooo kinah ever spent!)

Now, tell me that girl doesn’t have attitude. She’d be fun to go out drinking with, although there might be a fight or two before the night is over. She’d get you into trouble, but then watch your back.

Even the wings have attitude.  :)

Homeopathic A&E

This made me laugh this morning. (Note: if you don’t know anything about homeopathic medicine, read here so you know what they’re talking about.)

I use homeopathic remedies myself (I have lupus and it allows me to be mobile without taking corticosteroids) – but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find this amusing.  :)

friday oh crap moment

So I have some search optimisation work to do for a customer, just a quick thing at 4:30 on Friday. Customer is using a custom-themed WordPress installation for his site.

I grab the header file from the theme folder, and add a couple of lines for hardcoded meta data (he doesn’t have an SEO plugin). I don’t back the file up because if the hardcoded lines don’t work for whatever reason, I’ll just delete them out and re-upload.

I upload the file…and his site breaks. Bizarre, but whatever – I delete out the lines, and re-upload it. Nothing happens. I now have the horrible realisation that I must have downloaded the header file from the wrong theme folder.

I resemble the air traffic controller in Airport, who keeps saying things like “Guess I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”  I’m sweating bullets.

As a last resort, I check the pages that Google has indexed, and there’s a cached version of the site from June. I grab all the code that I’m hoping comprise his custom header…

…and it works.

I’ll sacrifice an offering to the Tech Gods later for that favour. Right now, I’m shaking, and I very much need a stiff drink.

The Fall

Via a blog post, I found a movie that we’ve rented and I’m quite excited about seeing: The Fall. I’ve always loved The Cell, purely for the lushness of the visual design (I freely admit that it was a pretty crap movie), and this one is by the same director, Tarsem Singh. It could be a bad movie…but it looks so pretty.

Call me shallow, I’m a sucker for pretty.

aion *sigh*

Today I am not playing Aion (because I am at work) just as I didn’t play it last night (because the EU login servers were down). It was to be expected, really, since beta keys seemed to have been sent to literally everyone. We even got one from a place where we had cancelled our game order. So, bang on 8:00 pm in the UK, every fanboi and his dog were trying to log in and the authentication servers went down.

They handled it well – I was looking at a couple of fansites, and NCsoft reps were posting status updates. Quite a different experience from the Warhammer EU fiasco where Goa made thousands of enemies due to their incompetence and lack of customer care. In one of the posts they referred to it as a “learning experience” with a wry sense of humour. And no one frothed at the mouth, extremely unusual in gamers eagerly awaiting access to a game – they tend to act rather like a baby who has dropped his lollipop on the ground.

I’ve decided that I will level two characters, a templar and a cleric. The friends whom I’m playing with have decided on being Elyos, so I suppose that I will play sheep and go along. I figure that everyone else are going to be Assassins, or failing that Sorcerors and Spiritmasters, so I will chose a couple of classes that will make getting into groups easier. After so many years of being a Warcraft hunter, I’m fed up with being the red-headed stepchild.  :)

Damn…will 5:00 never come?  After I get off work,  I have a 1 1/2 hour drive home, a trip to the market, then dinner and cat feeding and so on…then Aion. And all you other bastards better stay off my server this time.  *snicker*

Akuro No Oka

This song has been in my head since I woke up this morning. I’ve posted the live version (even though Kyo has a tendency to go a bit offkey in places) because I don’t like the video for this song.