Josie the Pussycat

Lets be truthful at this point. You are not coming here for my writing anymore, but instead updates tales of a tiny furry butt that now officially inhabits my household. Yesterday did not exactly go as planned, because when we went to visit on Monday they told us that it was within the realm of possibility that we might get a call yesterday to pick miss Josie up. We have officially named her Josie the Pussycat and I guess in my mind I didn’t want to finish the prep work for fear of jinxing it. Just shy of 4 pm I got a phone call from the vet that works with the Animal Shelter and by 4:30 I was jetting out of downtown to head over there to get her. We have kept the pet carrier in the car at the ready for the last several days as a sort of weird “go bag” for when the event finally happened.

Luckily my wife was able to bail a little early and get home before me to finish putting litter in the litter box and setting out food and water and such. We were 98% there on setting up the isolation room we had planned, but the best laid plans often times go off the rails. Our upstairs bathroom is meant to be the master suite bathroom for the house and because of all of the extra space that is where we keep a row of litter boxes. Off of that room is a separate fully enclosed tub with a sitting bench and our master plan was to quarantine her off into that room. We had it all made up with a cat bed, a scratching post, a bunch of toys and of course a food and water dish. She did not like this room however and anytime we left it… she screamed her head off.

So that plan lasted all of five minutes and instead we regrouped and went with the ole tried and true. Every cat we have taken home has spent time in my wife’s office and as a result we now have another kitty suite set up in there. My wife of course spent the entire evening up there with her and she is already chill as hell. She does not seem to notice she had surgery because at one point she full leaped off of my shoulder before I could stop her. This morning she was curled up in the cat bed completely conked out and once I finish writing this post I am going to go in there and hang for a bit while my car warms up. I think she already realizes she is at home, and my hope is that we can introduce her into the wider house before very long. At the moment Kenzie is being a butt about it, but she is kinda a butt about everything. I am not getting to spend much time with Josie because I more or less need to be a stable force for Kenzie to rotate around out in the rest of the house. My wife will also be out of the country in a week or so and as a result probably needs to get in as much bonding time as possible in the short term.

My original plan for the evening was to hang out and play some TemTem, the not-Pokemon MMORPG. That however didn’t exactly go as planned. I was one of the backers of the game on Kickstarter and have played before when it was in stress test mode. I figured I would calmly slide in and start playing last night but when the login screen announced that I was in an over 9000 player queue, I figured it was probably not going to bode well. I did however manage to create a character and the only thing wrong with the character screen is the lack of beard options. Granted you are playing a child character… but I can dream of having a beard.

There were however opening day jitters as the game more or less was unplayable. During the time in the Tutorial area there were massive pauses between loading screens. Once I entered the open world however and encountered my first random TemTem… the game just straight up froze on me. Fifteen minutes later I abandoned hope and Alt+F4’d out of the game and went on with my night. They apparently posted about these issues, and were looking into resolving them. I am guessing they are using a peer to peer scheme and were blaming the issues on some players slow or unresponsive connections.

Okay, we should go to sleep now.

Game is mostly stable. We will be pushing fixes later in the day to improve everything.

Thank you all so much for bearing with us. Love you to the moon and back.

If you want to help us and you have time, don't forget to post a review on Steam!

— Temtem (@PlayTemtem) January 22, 2020

I have to give them credit because based on their Twitter feed it seems like they were furiously stomping bugs all night long and finally crashed out about 3 am my time. Considering that Tem Tem is developed by a Studio in Madrid Spain that means they signed off at 10 am after having spent all night trying to deal with launch issues. Hopefully tonight things will be more manageable.

What I did instead between trips into the other office to play with Josie was continue my adventures on Teer Fradee. The only real complaint I have with this game so far is that the encounters are not at all organic. As you travel along a path you know with pretty regularity that you will encounter groups of mobs at fixed points in the journey. Additionally there are large swaths of the game with absolutely nothing going on at all which feels a little weird. As I understand it this is sorta a general problem with games by this studio, but it is also the only thing that really stops it from feeling like a Dragon Age or Witcher game. I purchased the previous game by Spiders, and I think once I finish this one I will give it a shot as well. It is as a whole a little rough around the edges but the game itself is generally rather good.