Natterings From Nepantla

I had to put my thermal on for the morning commute on Monday. In September! It's not supposed to get that cold this soon.

Cat

Another cat from the catio tour. I didn't really take many pictures of actual catio features.

Fandom

Any day now I should be getting my Orycon schedule. Their programming department usually gets schedules out a month before the con. If that sounds reasonable, about 2 weeks ahead is more typical of sf cons in my experience.

Gaming

Made real progress toward the Fame goal in Sunless Skies. I didn't expect to play it at all once the anime premieres got started, but they've been very evenly spread.

I had a very meh showing at this weekend's KeyForge event with a deck I wasn't very enthusiastic about anyway, so I decided to open one of the unopened ones I have lying around and got Iron "Updog" Jonas, who has some neat cards I haven't seen before.

Books and media

Before the Renaissance book, I forgot to mention I read Broken Stars, a collection of recent Chinese short fiction edited by Ken Liu. Since it's intended to provide a wide range, not everything is going to work for everyone. My favorites were one about philosophers trying to impress the first Qin emperor, and one that had a different take on the whole idea of alternate history. I can't really say why without massive spoilers.

No time to watch anything but anime this week. My current favorite premiere is the one that turned out to be a Harry Potter parody.

Politics

Not that politics haven't been very interesting in the English-speaking world lately, but you're probably all up to date on whichever parts of it matter to you.

That new rain gear that was going to take three weeks to get to me? Showed up three days ago. Aramark is taking "underpromise and overdeliver" very seriously, it seems.

Cat

The most relaxed cat on the Catio Tour, in the best-named catio they've ever had: Fort Catsop (after locally well-known landmark Fort Clatsop).

Fandom

I now have a supporting membership for Smofcon 37, now that it offers supporting memberships. Last year's Smofcon streamed a few program items, and when the topic came up this year someone (perhaps snarkily) suggested that it would be great if the remote listeners were helping pay for the cost of streaming, whereupon several of us said that we'd be perfectly happy to pay for some kind of online-only membership to help defray costs.

Gaming

Only two people showed up for this week's KeyForge session, likely due to Rose City Comic Con happening this weekend. We played a couple of non-official games and I made a decision about what deck I'll bring to the next one.

Tried to make some actual progress toward my goal in Sunless Skies instead of just flying around exploring. Also went back to Fire Emblem: Awakening for a couple more chapters on Hard mode.

Books and media

I finished browsing through the Basque book and got picked up Terminal World by Alasdair Reynolds, which I'm most of the way through. Great setting, nice crunchy sf, and a good pace of revealing clues so that you can play along with the characters and figure out things before they do; but also some very Hollywood villains and a repetitive tendency for characters to dismiss things as "people you don't need to know about" or "no one goes there" or "never mind what the side effects are" followed by those things shortly turning out to be very important indeed. The protagonist is a pretty smart guy and I wish he'd started asking a few more questions by now. All in all, a great example of why Reynolds is just an author I read to tide myself over between new Peter F. Hamilton books.


I took my first look at the upcoming anime season and aaaaaaah it looks bad.

( Politics )

Fall is here! (Meteorologically speaking, anyway.) On the one hand, this means colder weather. On the other hand, it means the return of the crossing guard in that intersection by the school where people regularly stop in the crosswalk when there isn't anyone controlling traffic.

Cat

I wanted to get a picture of Monty and Phosphor to demonstrate how huge Phosphor is. Instead of holding still to serve as a scale reference, Monty did this. I tried to get a picture of Marlene instead, but she suspected I was up to something and ran off.

Fandom

Now that the anime columns are being posted about separately and I haven't heard back from DisCon III, there's not much to talk about here. There's a project I could talk about, but it needs its own post to explain why the current challenge is trying to find a way to get along with Angular 2.

Gaming

Eggsy is now down to four chains, and I have accepted that getting it up to six chains playing against very good players who were bringing decks with no handicap at all was enough of an accomplishment. Next time I bring one of the ones that I unsealed in May and haven't played since.

Made good progress in Sunless Skies, exploring a new Realm and then finding an interesting way to die. Must remember to do that ritual differently with the next captain.

Books and media

Having made it to the end of The Wealth of Nations, I am celebrating by, uh, reading more British nonfiction. Grease Junkie by Edd China (or a ghostwriter, for all I know) is a belated birthday present from the SO. It details Mr. China's many adventures in building odd mechanical things, ranging from the world's fastest couch to the time he decided to try converting a bus into an apartment. Lots of useful technical details with a occasional asides like "there were only a few minor fires".

Politics

Nothing worth linking to this week.

After a spate of cool weather last week, it's back to summer. Kinda. It's been warm, but also very gray and gloomy.

Cat

Monty is a grabby little cat even when he's trying to sleep.

Fandom

Anime commentary happened. The Ones Within is never going to make it to the level of the other two shows but I can sure count on it to keep things weird every week.

Hugo voting statistics have been released (PDF) and, as usual, nothing I nominated even turned up on the extended lists. I'm very happy to see Into the Spider-Verse (which I didn't nominate because I didn't get a chance to see it until a few weeks ago) picking up another award, though.

Gaming

Despite what I said last week about the crashes, I decided to try Sunless Skies one more time, and it didn't crash. And then another, and it didn't crash then, and so forth, and now it's been a week of playing it almost every day and just an occasional stutter. I'm loving it now.

Eggsy got two wins and one agonizingly close loss in this week's tournament, for two more chains. One more result like this, and it'll reach power level 2, at which point I'll take it out of FLGS play for now.

Books and media

After another chunk of Adam Smith, started on Teckla. I'm enjoying the organization of the book as a list of explanations for the stains that need removal and damage that needs repairing in the narrator's business clothing.

BEM is finally back and has certainly erased all trace of whatever parallels episode 4 had with the KyoAni tragedy.
( Politics )