This is Book. So named for looking like he's got writing on him, and since "Boo" and "Bo" for short also suit him. His mellow temperament also reminds us of Shepherd Book from Firefly.
To expand on that particular metaphor, he inadvertently spooks our in-house mental patient, whose most positive reaction to him so far has been along the lines of "keep walkin', preacher man".
We adopted Book as a late anniversary present to each other, and Autumn (River? ;^) hasn't fully forgiven us since. They can be civil at close quarters as long as they're sleepy or getting snacks, but otherwise Book is eager to play and Autumn is eager to growl, hiss, and be a drama queen until pesty little brother goes away.
It will be in Autumn's interests to warm up to him sooner than later, since at 8 months Book is showing every sign that he's going to be a big beefy boy.
Welcome to the family little guy, we're happy you seem to like us all. ...Even though your big sister's a brat. ...And your human parents are silly enough to keep adopting you young energy-filled cats.
We bought a house. We've been moving into it. There's more to tell there than is worth telling, and certainly more than is worth reading about. But the other day we moved a big couch and chair, which required renting a van. In lieu of my usual long-winded babbling, here are a few captured moments.
It's just a bruise. But yeah, it scared me at first too.
One thing that I haven't seen dug up from the 1980s, slathered in modern attention-deficit-mediocrity and re-sold to us is those little finger puppet monsters. They contained no sound chips, activated no unlockable video game content, and were cheap enough to come in happy meals. Probably. Who knows if I can remember the 80s correctly.
Alternate opening paragraph:
Nowadays everybody's 3D-printing fidget spinners. Perfectly fitting for today - can't sit still, noisy, no personality. Me, I've got a not-completely-atrophied imagination and my little 3D pen came with some flexible rubbery plastic stock. So now if my fingers need to do some fidgeting, here's what I've got:
Precision, detailed figures they are not. But, they're cute enough not to have been banished from my desk yet.
A lifetime ago, we had a sweet kitty who, when boarded at the vet's while we were away, managed to knock over a room full of pet carriers. Everything survived, more or less, but ever since then our carrier has been suspiciously missing one of the clips that holds it together.
With Murphy, that wasn't a problem since she basically weighed nothing. Our current kitty, though, has a bit more junk in the trunk, and is going to need proper support when we move, and take her to her overdue vet visit, etc.
3D printers are all the rage, able to turn files from CAD or animation software into physical, strong plastic parts. I'd like to have one of those some day but for now the closest I've got is a more arts-and-crafts version - a 3D pen that draws in plastic by hand. It really is to a 3D printer what an ink pen is to an inkjet printer. With a steady hand and some thinking ahead, it's possible to make useful stuff.
My hand isn't super steady and I don't plan things all that well, but
still the replacement carrier clip turned out pretty nicely. :^)
The inside of a pen with a couple layers of masking tape was just the right size to scribble the part's "hooks" onto. The flat bits are just a matter of filling in a shape on paper (or on masking tape, since the melted plastic doesn't stick to that quite as stubbornly).
It snapped right into place, just like the "real" one. If I cared about it being pretty, I could sand it down a bit, but since its lot in life is to clamp together a cat carrier, I called it good as-is.
If it's not a bit dinged up and cobbled-together, it's probably not mine. (My wife wishes I wouldn't say that, but she's the exception that proves the dinged-up, cobbled-together rule. :^)
So the Grievous Oligarchy Party has, on behalf of those few who already have everything, have taken by hook and crook the final pillar of this old republic. Any legitimacy of our institutions is truly forfeit. Power and money now rule people who once ruled themselves.
And now they're going to war. Now, it doesn't feel, to me, today, like nuclear annihilation of humanity is certain or imminent. But it also doesn't feel very far-fetched. And I suspect that if the day comes, for many of us it will be a bit of a surprise, even now.
Just in case we don't have a lot longer, I want to thank the people who have touched my life. I hope I've made you smile; that's the most rewarding thing I've found in life. My thanks to you. To everyone who's made me smile, and who's made anybody smile. Humanity has in many ways become a blight on this little blue orb in our little arm of our not-terribly-unique galaxy in our grand cosmos, but I'm happy to have existed. We are what we are. We like to pretend that isn't so, that there's "us" and "them". I do it too. Right up there, I call out some of us as power-hungry. Tyrannical. Illegitimate. Dishonest.
We're all just humans, which have a tangled and snarly genetic ancestry. We grew capable of guiding our own development, building our own significance. That was a neat trick. We don't know any other critters who managed it. We even grew capable of authoring our own ending, releasing our own constructs. It's a shame, it's a waste. But that is power.
That is what we acquired. Power does not care whether it is stolen piecemeal or granted by unanimous consent or a byproduct of natural physics. Power made us, and will some day, some way, unmake us. Gravitational dances of rocks wield more power than anything we humans have faffed around with. We can shape and transform our own little sphere, to an extent. We have the power to destroy everything everybody has ever built, and to feed and care for everybody who's here now. Most of the time we use our power without such concentration. Destroy a bit here, care a bit there.
So, what happens next? There's no "them" to ask, just us. All of us: what's next?
[ Edit about the whole "going to war" bit: It seems increasingly likely
that this was just a bit of illegally-conducted theatre, but we're talking about an
unstable amateur bombing an unstable region, and a complicit congress
which talks big but does very little to restrain the madmanchild. Let's
hope I'm overreacting, like I was about Citizens United and rich bastards lying to us. Oh wait. ]
[ Second edit: Oh for crying out loud what are we doing. ]
Autumn is a strange little cat. There was no distinction in her little head between fun-exercise playing and life-or-death fighting when we first got her. She's much less rough around the edges now, but when she's feisty, there's a bloodlust and a need for savage close-quarters combat I've not seen in a domestic cat before. Batting a little ribbon or feather does not cut it in most cases.
In the heat of mock-battle, there's hissing and growling and grabbing and kicking and yelling. Claws and fangs swing and chomp without restraint. With my childhood cat, I did this kind of thing by hand, and got a little scratched up. This one plays ROUGH - bare handed play might end in me bleeding out. (I have seriously considered buying a falconry glove, but it would need a pretty long sleeve.)
By the by, it is remarkably difficult to A) record video of a cat while playing with her, and B) convince a cat to do even a very usual thing on-command. This is the best I could get without waiting for her to decide on her own that it was feisty time.
All this brings me to my latest haphazardly-crafted object: Sockmonster Mk. 4!
This is the entire Sockmonster family line, or what's left of it. The original Sockmonster is actually inside of Mk. 2; its skin was a much flimsier and less interestingly-textured sock, and it was the quickest to spill its (mostly plastic-bag) innards. All but the latest incarnations have had gashes patched up with the handyman's secret weapon, duct tape.
Mk. 2 subsumed the original and added an inner skin of brown paper for extra crunchiness. Over time the stuffing got all shoved into the end, and indeed began to get ripped out like viscera.
Mk. 3 introduced a semi-rigid spine, a nice thin chunk of plastic that would bend a bit and spring back. I also attempted to build it with segregated internal stuffing compartments, Titanic-style, to keep the stuffing evenly distributed. But as you may be able to tell, the mid-point is a very popular kicking target, so the spine broke and the center stuffing compartment appears to have hernia'd out.
For the fourth one, the spine is a towel rolled up as tight as I could get it. No plastic to wear out and snap. The stuffing is in one big tube around the spine, and of the whole thing is wrapped in a couple layers of claw-armor burlap and chompy-thick felt.
Originally, I had both ends sewn up, but the thickness and firmness of the thing made it hard to grip one-handed. Luckily, one end was pretty weak since this whole thing was an exercise in making it up as I go, and Autumn quickly tore it open again for me. A little stuffing out of that end, squeeze up the sides a bit and boom, handle. Much better. :^) It's a collaborative process, as it turns out.
So, we'll see how this works. As one might expect, if one were familiar with cats, now that some effort has gone into constructing a more robust Sockmonster, kitty's aforementioned interest in brutal hand-to-hand combat has begun to sharply drop off. These days she's all about running and being chased.
I concentrated a lot on physical points of failure, but forgot that a cat toy is a failure right away if the little furball doesn't want it. Still, we'll see. She has her moods and phases; it may well fall into favor again one day.
Update:
She may not like the thing I spent time and effort on, but boy does she ever go nuts on this $5 grill mitt.
Another update:
We've gotten our $5 out of the mitt, but it now offers very little fang or claw protection.
This is mostly a note to my future self so that next time I set up a Linux machine, I don't have to re-invent this particular wheel.
Most computers nowadays, by default, display text using sub-pixel rendering. Microsoft calls their implementation "ClearType", and I'm sure Apple has some similarly innocent-sounding name for it. Without getting into the technical details, it's an optical illusion that, apparently, for most of the population, makes text nice and clear to read. For me, it looks smeary, and makes my eyes continuously strain and toil to make everything all right. They fail, and I get a mighty headache if I keep looking for too long.
Naturally, on my own computers I turn this noise the hell off. But for a while now, there has been one niggling little hiccup where the first QT program I load (or maybe it's KDE specific, I really don't know. All GTK and other programs are fine.) would fail to honor my very explicit settings and fall back on the default behaviour of stabbing me in the corneas. The workaround was quick and easy, and generally if I'm at the computer I'm busy trying to do something, so I let the problem stagnate.
But in upgrading my laptop recently, I had one more little burst of attempting to figure this nonsense out, and figure it I finally did.
I don't even know which line(s) make the difference. I just found a handful of Xft settings to try and lo, once these crunch through xrdb when the session starts, all is well. These can go in a global Xresources file too of course.
I hope this helps somebody else, and I'm pretty sure it will at least help future me.
keywords for searching:
disable subpixel antialiasing
prevent sub-pixel anti-aliasing
qt kde first launch ignore freetype settings
why the crap do some programs use horrible blearytype font rendering
To others whose eyes are allergic to this crap but are also stuck on Windows, be warned: your Windows lies to you. If you ask it to turn off ClearType, it will claim that it has done so and carry on smearing your text with eyeball-shredding colors. You have to go through some crazy multi-step "Which of these looks better to you?" quiz to truly turn it off, and sometimes every one of the options presented will be using subpixel rendering. So, as always, good luck Windows folks.
The gremlins in my head, on a quiet day, ask only that I wash my hands a bit more than an average person would. On a raucous day, they demand that I create something and share it. They don't ask nicely. It doesn't matter what I come up with, whether it's any good, or with whom I share it. This occasionally causes some embarrassment, but one learns to deal with that. If the gremlins are ignored, they begin wreaking havoc and this fun, grumpy person becomes an un-fun grumpy person.
A side-effect of paying any attention to the world around me is that when the world goes mad, I go a bit mad with it. Anxiety and dread leak right inside and stir the gremlins. "Pain is good for art" and all that. I'm a very fortunate and privileged person, and not what most would call talented, so my use of the words "pain" and "art" is a bit of a stretch. But that's fine. In any case, my brain gremlins and I have been on edge lately.
The gremlins are soothed by simple seeds growing into complex patterns.
I played around with randomized, low-fidelity pixel art. 8x8
noise of a single random color, mirrored for symmetry. The
human brain (well, mine anyway) will turn almost any such shape into something recognizable. A penguin
with antlers. An armored soldier. A dog walking upright. A happy toad
or a skull with pigtails. Once I got a bunch of these drawing on screen, it seemed like asking the simple question "who are you?" might be interesting.
The gremlins like music; during worrisome times, songs get stuck in my head far more easily than usual. Recently my noggin was cycling this Cat Stevens song, for reasons I won't try to understand.
The bit that kept rolling around in my brain was "if you want to be me, be me". Might it be interesting to have some kind of interactive mechanic that boils down to "be me" when you meet someone? Well, I already had plenty of random pixel people to meet.
You can see I've got some other stuff going on there too. Random names, offspring from mathematically averaging the pixel characters. I also threw something together to randomly build up a map. And some random special rooms for whatever weird tools and functions I was playing with. And gave each character random traits that determine what and how they can see, where they can go, how they get noticed.
Why I stuck with an Atari aesthetic (including directions and one action button) I do not know. Why I wrote the code almost entirely on my phone during insomnia hours rather than from the comfort of a proper computer, I do not know. Why I named it "RPG1" and retrofitted a bunch of acronyms in its manual, I do not know.
What I do know is that from the chaos, some interesting effects cropped up. As a moose I traded feet with a bunch of bananas, and suddenly I could go places I could not reach before. I was a butterfly who talked with and became a spring-propelled robot, after which I could not see the butterfly anymore. As a thief, I met a two-headed bird and had a screen full of three-headed turtle babies.
It's a bit of a hot mess, but there. Happy, gremlins? No? You already have some more stupid little projects lined up? Hm. Gonna be an interesting few years to be me.
Here it is. The new age, where nothing makes sense and the more asinine it sounds, the more likely it is to be happening. Good, evil, right, wrong, fact, fiction, none of it means anything. Things just are. Because loud, proud ignorance says so.
It's an interesting time to be alive. I've never been bored in my life, but I would sure love to try it. As it is, though, I'm going to be angry and frustrated and terrified and indignant for some time. I'd say something like "four years", but let's not assume time or space or anything else are comprehensible phenomena anymore. Or that dissidents like myself won't be jailed or hanged by then. Or that all life on Earth won't have simply been obliterated by nuclear weapons. Nothing's given, things just are. Because small, spiteful vanity says so.
So far, the worst expectations I could muster have only ended up demonstrating the limits of my own imagination. But my dense optimism means everybody here has one more ally -- I will stay and fight. The temptation to abandon this poisoned ship and its lunatic captain will be overwhelming, but we have to stand strong. Because courage and right and decency say so. Those things don't exist in this age, true enough, so it falls to each of us to create them.
Dissent is patriotic. We shall overcome. [Inspirational quip #3 not found.]
