Natterings From Nepantla

With relatives in town practically all week, have hardly had time to do anything else. I did manage pick up that book I was looking forward to, though.

Cats

Phosphor tries to hold off the umpteenth enthusiastic grooming of the day. I am unsympathetic because when Phosphor was Monty's age, his grooming technique involved putting the other cat in a headlock first.

Fandom

Orycon is suddenly looming before me and I need to get some stuff written down for that panel.

Gaming

Really hardly time to do anything this week, but today I did make it through another chapter of Fire Emblem: Awakening and managed the super-difficult pairing of Chrom and Olivia.

Books and media

Somehow I found time to read Salvation Lost. Just finished off the Australian sf collection, and started The Raven Tower.
( Politics )

It was dark when I got up even though I lazed around until after 7am. I can't wait for the end of daylight saving time.

Cat

A rather handsome if apprehensive fellow on the catio tour. No, I didn't take many pictures of actual catio features...

Fandom

I got my Orycon panel schedule. It consists of one panel, but it's one I've been pitching to almost every convention I've been a panelist at for over a decade, so I'm happy.

Gaming

Went to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this weekend, which is a post all by itself. While there, played a lot of Mii Plaza and a couple chapters of Fire Emblem: Awakening.

I learned that The Crucible, the unofficial online KeyForge play forum, has updated itself to the current card set after all, so I've started playing a game or two a day there. It's a good way to practice not making stupid mistakes, but it's not going to replace the gaming store games. It doesn't have the camaraderie, or the benefit of just getting out of the house... and what it does have is rather a lot of people who will quit in the middle of games rather than lose.

Books and media

The final push to get the anime premieres over with crowded just about everything else out. Though I did finally remember to pre-order Salvation Lost.
( Politics )

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 )

After the user conference excursion day, there is the first day of the conference proper, when the users get to invade the office for an evening, then two more days of conference sessions. It went well, I learned a useful thing or two, I got to wear the blouses that sit at the back of the closet for the rest of the year.

Cat

Shy Cat is another of Phosphor's outdoor relatives. Over the years, she's become less and less shy. When I bring her some canned food, she's willing to be almost within arm's reach. Any attempt to actually reach out, though, results in the hand being swatted.

Fandom

Anime commentary was posted. Also I went to that sort-of convention I just posted about.

Gaming

In addition to the con, still playing Fallen London about every other day.

In Fire Emblem Awakening, I'd forgotten how quickly the chapter where Chrom chooses a bride comes up. Unfortunately, since the player character is the first of his potential matches to be in the story, one has to work hard to make sure he gets more attached to a different character, if one doesn't want to marry the player character off to him. Restarted and have been replaying with Chrom under the Mike Pence rule.

(Though Fire Emblem Fates also included the romantic pairing mechanic, it gives you full transparency about it and lets you take as long as you want to pair up the exact characters you want.)

Books and media

New approach for trying to get through The Wealth of Nations: after I finish a book of that, I let myself read one book from my unread pile. This week it was Jhereg, first of the Dragaera novels. Whatever I expected, fantasy noir about a guy and his fire lizard was not quite it. (The person responsible for the cover copy, though, recognized the appeal of fire lizards and played up that aspect bigtime.)

Jhereg gives the impression of walking in in the middle of a story; events are referred to that I presume are fleshed out in later books, and revelations are dropped casually which sound like they should be the payoffs to multiple volumes of setup. I know there's an argument about whether the books should be read in chronological or publication order. I went with publication order since that's the author's recommendation, but I'm rethinking that. I already have the next two in publication order, though, so I guess I'll just see how those go.

I'm still watching BEM on the side even though I'm not blogging it, except I'm not. Episode 4 has been delayed two weeks on account of content which apparently has too much resemblance to the KyoAni arson. It's not the first show this has happened to (not surprisingly, the first was Fire Force).

( Politics )

I got to go to OSCON 2019 this week. Saw interesting and not-so-interesting presentations, learned things, might have a new favorite programming language. (Full disclosure: I get excited about new programming languages very easily.)

I'm seeing a lot of posts all around the net the last couple days on the topics of Boy It's Hot Today and What The Moon Landing Means To Me. It's only just topped 80F here, and as a child of the 1980s, the moon landing is primarily associated in my mind with reading bitter commentary about how Kennedy blew up the chance to do space right.

Cat

Barbecue Cat, one of Phosphor's feral relatives, considers whether it's worth getting up from the nice warm patio and scurrying away, or whether the human might keep its distance.

Fandom

Here a are the rest of the summer premieres. I seem to be on a country music quote kick.

Somebody on the Amazing Stories editorial staff is tinkering with the look and feel of the blog. It looks like maybe I can stop worrying about finding at least one screencap that looks decent when trimmed to a square image.

Books and media

Nothing watched beyond anime. I am definitely going to keep watching BEM even though it looks like it won't be bloggable due to limited distribution.

I finished reading Lost Cities of Africa and will say something more about it at some point.

Gaming

The impending release of Fire Emblem: Three Houses is getting me excited about Fire Emblem all over again, except I don't have a Switch and won't be getting one any time soon, so instead I've gone back to Fire Emblem: Awakening for a playthrough on Hard mode.

Have also been checking in on Fallen London. I'm not really sure what I'm doing but I seem to be making progress.

( Politics )

I'm writing this from La Grande, Oregon, on the way back from Spikecon.

Cat

This is Obnoxious Cat, who snarls at me as I put the ferals' food out in the morning, and then swoops in and eats a little bit of it himself. We thought he was feral himself, but after we put fliers up around the neighborhood to make sure, we got a call from his owner.

Also he's already been neutered. I can only imagine what he was like before that.

Fandom

There was a weekly anime commentary to finish off the last couple shows of spring and also the season preview.

And I made it to Spikecon. Con report at a later date.

Books and media

I started in on a reread of Lost Cities of Africa to see if it can add anything useful to my miniatures project.

It's anime premiere time, so I'm watching a couple of those per day. Favorite so far: Dr. Stone is everything I hoped it would be. In another tab, I have the page where Funimation should have posted the first episode of BEM by now open so that I can refresh it every few minutes.

Gaming

Nothing to say outside of the Spikecon report.

( Politics )

So I'll try this weekly notes thing and see how it works.

It's late June and I had to turn on the heat this morning. Ah, summer in Portland.

Cat

This is Phosphor. He's 9 years old, more active than any other 9-year-old cat I've known, and huge. He would be the king of all he surveys, except he has no assertiveness at all with other cats. As a kitten, he was the first feral cat we captured from the backyard, and he's helped tame subsequent kittens.

( This got long, adding a cut... )