Month: January 2020

Outlaw Josie Cat

by

It has been an interesting weekend, but also a very productive one. Friday night my wife spent the evening in her office penned up with Josie as we had been doing for the last several nights. Saturday morning we took her to the vet to get a brief checkup and to establish her with the practice. They said that she looks like a very healthy young cat and while there is a bit of a bump where the incision for her surgery was, that this was more or less normal. Young female cats especially are active and stress the muscles around the incision causing some inflammation. We were told to watch it and watch her behavior and if anything strange happened to bring her back in.

Josie was getting bored of being penned up in the office and had become a rather successful escape artist darting out between our legs the moment we opened the office door. On Saturday we more or less just went with it and let her out into the world to roam around and explore. There were some hisses as to be expected but no violent reactions. In fact Josie seemed adorably oblivious to any shade that Kenzie and Mollie were throwing her way. There were a few times where Kenzie was intent on blocking her path and Josie just ran quickly around her like nothing was going on. The one that I have been the most surprised by is Mollie who seems to be having the biggest reaction. All of this time I have attributed the dynamics between Kenzie and Mollie as Kenzie being a bully. However watching Mollie with Josie is making me start to doubt this.

Always in the past Kenzie would try and get close and sniff Mollie… and then Mollie would make the first hostile sounds which would lead to Kenzie reaching over and bopping her on the head. I always sorta took this as Kenzie being the aggressor, but it could just be the Kenzie is big and adorable and doofy and couldn’t figure out why Mollie didn’t want to play. I am not sure if I am ready to attribute all of the malice here to Mollie, but so far Kenzie seems to be relatively chill about this whole thing with occasional bouts of hissing. However there have been long periods where they have both been in near proximity without any sort of violent reaction. The truth is this is going as smoothly as I could possibly hope, because Luna several years back would have horrible clashes with Kenzie and I never knew how much of that was Luna and how much was Kenzie. We eventually had to find her a new home with a lovely lady where she could be part of a single cat home.

Saturday night she went back up to the office for the night, and then after I got breakfast and did the morning tasks I let her out. I fed all three cats in the same room from separate bowls and for the most part that was acceptable. From that point however she was out the entire day, including a period of time when we went out and ran some errands leaving the girls along at home to fend for themselves. For the most part things seem to be smooth, enough so that we opted to leave her out over night. She crawled up with us in bed and slept there the entire night, or at least as entire night as our conscious selves were aware of. I know she tolerated being adjusted several times without getting up as I ran to the restroom around 2 am and she largely ignored that I jostled her. There was a short period of time when I had both Kenzie and Josie side by side on the bed… and while Kenzie hissed and eventually hopped down that was all that came of it.

The major transgression happened Sunday morning however while I was editing AggroChat. Josie had been dragging this cat toy around with her and she drug it into my office because she apparently wanted to be close to me and be able to play with it at the same time. It isn’t like she was trying to bring it to me to play, she just wanted to roll around and attack it while being nearby. Various things happened and it ended up down in the landing along with one of the Kenzie’s hairbands that she loves to play fetch with. My wife decided to toss both up since Kenzie and Josie were sitting a few feet apart near the entrance to our two offices, and Josie completely misread the signal. Both Josie and Kenzie dove for the hairband at roughly the same time… but Josie was a little faster and snagged it running off quickly causing Kenzie to ponder this sequence of events and run away herself. Kenz had this massive “what the hell just happened” look and decided retreat was the best possible course of action.

For now at least I am trying to spend most of my time downstairs on the sofa, so that the other two girls can snuggle in a manner that is “normal” and uninterrupted while Josie roams around and does her thing. While Josie regularly comes to visit, I am trying to choose Kenzie and Mollie time because they are both bonded more closely with me and I don’t want them to view this as some grand betrayal. While they have shown a bit of hissing and minor aggression towards my wife they continue to still be willing to love on me so I am guessing this is working as intended. Tonight I will likely be downstairs on the sofa again playing things remotely through Parsec with my fuzzy blanket and in theory will have Kenzie on my legs and Mollie on my side. At some point Josie will need to learn the joy of the fuzzy blanket, but for now I am trying to remain a sanctuary for our elder girls.

All of that said… things are going as smoothly as possible, and I think we have our cats introduced as well as could be expected. Four days of isolation, two days of partial interaction, 1 day of full interaction and now we are just in seemingly permanent free roam mode.

AggroChat #285 – All Hail the Ferrite Bead

by
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start the show by letting you off the hook and explaining a reference that originally I was just going to make the show title without explaining. Bel has been playing an obsessive amount of Greedfall and it is the sort of experience that the deeper he gets into the game the more his opinion of it improves.  Tam has been playing Elsinore a game where you recast Hamlet with the goal of trying to get Ophelia to survive. In many ways he says this is the game that he wished Return of the Obra Dinn had been. Bel talks about TemTem the not-Pokemon MMORPG which will likely give the storied franchise a run for its money because it is really well done.  Kodra takes our advice and explores Into the Breach and has an “Oh Crap It’s 2 am, how did that happen” moment. Finally Bel is astonished that Theros Beyond Death brings back Underworld Dreams at Uncommon rarity.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Mighty Ferrite Bead
    • What it does do
    • What it cannot do
  • Greedfall
    • Improving Opinion
    • Games that Sucker Punch You
  • Elsinore
    • Obra Dinn with Better Story
  • TemTem
    • As close to a Pokemon MMORPG you can get without being sued
    • Legitimate Competition for Pokemon
  • Into the Breach
    • Oh Crap It’s 2 am
  • Theros Beyond Death
    • Underworld Dreams is Uncommon?

Original Blog Post from AggroChat.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 3

by

We are still in the process of releasing all of the original episodes of Bel Folks Stuff as I build up a vault full of brand new content. This show originally aired on December 4th of 2014.

For years Alternative Chat otherwise known as Alt was a fixture of the World of Warcraft community. Over the years since I recorded this episode I have lost touch with her as to the best of my knowledge she is no longer doing the game blogging thing. This is something that happens as folks move in one direction and others move in a different occasionally perpendicular direction. However this episode was extremely enjoyable to record as we sat down to talk about stuff and things with a sizable dose of Warcraft. If you are interested in the things Alt is doing these days you can find her on the Internet of Words blog or on twitter via @MoveablePress or @InternetofWords.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Shocking Revelations

by

Most of the time when I am playing a video game it tends to track along a fairly predictable trajectory. After the core conflict has been established we generally follow a path that leads to its resolution without much deviation. Occasionally there are minor set backs but nothing really unexpected. Greedfall however managed to do something that few games do in that it caught me completely by surprise and threw some events out of left field that I was in no way planning for. There was a moment yesterday while playing where shit absolutely got real and I was forced to make some really hard decisions really rapidly without much time to mull them over. I am uncertain if I made the right decisions, but I appreciate that the game managed to catch me off guard like that.

Of note… predictability isn’t really something that bothers me much in as game. I actually sort of like moving forward checking off boxes as I go and reaching the conclusion that I see in front of me. I think this is why spoilers in general don’t bother me either, because so often I am sitting down and watching something and in my head I am predicting the next move or the character that is going to unexpectedly betray the on screen party. All of that said I am extremely pleasantly surprised when media manages to pull the wool over my eyes and shock me, and often times those experiences are much more memorable. Everyone remembers the first time they watched Seven, The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense if they managed to go into them without having the major spoilers revealed. The thing here though… is I think this shocking turn of events was caused by my own actions and I need to do some research to determine if I am in fact right about that.

I said yesterday how I tend to stick to playing the same handful of characters and ignoring the rest of the party. I think Greedfall is finally a game that is going to make me reconcile that sort of behavior with a vengeance. Now however I don’t really want to deviate from it because I am curious how deep this well goes. I’ve also noticed that at various points during the games I have failed quests that didn’t factor into my head as something that would be closing off to me by my actions. So I have this feeling that there are machinations going on behind the scenes in the decision tree that I am simply unaware of. While there are still some issues with Greedfall, the more I play it the more compelling I find it. I absolutely get why this made it onto the games of the year show.

Now since this is what my readers really want… some gratuitous pictures of Josie. She is such a sweetheart and this weekend we need to figure out how to start introducing her to the other cats. Kenzie has more or less stabilized and I have been trying to give Mollie and her the bulk of my attention. I spent about an hour in the office upstairs with Josie and they seemed to not mind at all. Kenzie returned to sitting on the box beside me while I played Greedfall immediately afterwards and didn’t act pissy about it… so I am guessing that is progress.

My wife has been getting the lion share of bonding time, and that is fine by me. She tends to follow me around anytime I am in the office so she absolutely knows who I am and that I am friendly. Right now I just think she wants constant attention after having come from a shelter environment. My hope is that we can start introducing her to the wider house and if I thought she would actually stay with us on the sofa we would do that. I would try and get Kenzie and Mollie to hang out with me on my side of the sectional and then wife could have Josie on the other side. Things with cats however never work out as planned… so we will see how everything shakes out.