Ironic that my ‘not much blogging’ post was the 1000th post on this site? Well, I think it’s ironic. Alanis Morissette may disagree.
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Not much blogging goin’ on
So my rate of blog posts has slowed over the last few months from the peak of 2008. You may ask ‘is it the fault of Twitter’, have my astounding insights been dulled and diluted by a desire to spout 140 character chunks of wisdom? Actually, it’s because I’m playing a lot of Lord of the Rings Online and various PS3 games really. On top of that we had a June and July from hell madness where we had visitors left right and centre and went to weddings and generally were out having a life.
I think Twitter is to ‘blame’ certainly for a reduction in the 2 line blog posts I would sometimes make and perhaps Twitter is a better place for that kind of thought anyway.
But mainly it takes some minutes to sit down and write a blog post or a movie review (increasingly, for films which have been out for several years and no one wants to read reviews about) and those minutes are at the moment taken up with Lord of the Rings, the PS3, the garden, the house or life.
I’m sure as Autumn sets in and Winter gets a grip on our goolies, I’ll be here more often, shivering out a few words of painful insight that you didn’t want to read in the first place.
Valkyria Chronicles
I recently completed this game on the PS3 and wanted to write a short post about it. It’s such an unusual game, and yet I enjoyed it a huge amount. The game is a mixture of anime, first-person shooter, turn-based strategy and roleplaying game, without really being any of those things fully. The game story unfolds through the use of animated stories about a bunch of central characters who have become involved in a war. Various chapters open up as the story develops, and each of those chapters has a number of battles. The stories aren’t interactive, you watch and listen. But the characters are interesting and the plot engaging.
When you get to a battle, you take control of a squad of troops who you can equip (and you can research new equipment), and train (to improve levels and gain new abilities) and then run through the fight. The battle itself is a mix of first-person and turn based. You pick a character to control from a turn-like map, you then control that character directly in first-person mode, running them through the battle dodging bullets. When you want to engage the enemy you switch to a control system that stops time and lets you aim at a single target, at which point you fire your weapon and then return to real time. You cycle through your squad, moving them and engaging the enemy over a number of rounds to achieve your objective. When you do, you’re rewarded with more story and more chapters.
That’s an ugly description of a beautiful game. The artwork is superb, the characters quirky and amusing and the game play truly engaging. If you have a PS3 this is a must buy – and it’s been out long enough now that you should be able to pick it up quite cheaply.
Quick garden update
We’re treating / painting our fence! Takes about an hour to do a single panel, slightly less now, and there’s 10 panels left on the side of the house with the most fence. Some photo’s for proof! We’re using the same stuff that our next door neighbour used first on her side of the fence, so she chose the colour which we actually quite like.
In order, the front including the half panels, the side, to show the difference between treated and untreated, and lastly, the remaining 10 panels.
The garden’s doing pretty well although we’re coming to the end of summer. The grass we seeded has grown in and we’re starting to get it tidy, and the flowers are really doing well and have looked great throughout the summer.
This year has seen us do more for the house / garden than we’ve ever done for any property we’ve ever lived in, without a doubt. There’s so much in the house we should still get sorted (but we’re just so bad at doing it, well, I am, Grete tries to encourage me, but I mainly just stall and fob her off) but getting the garden sorted has been such a good thing and I’m glad Grete has been able to enjoy it while the weather has been good.
The Guild – Season 3 – Episode 2
For your delectation and delight.
Some Cats
If you own cats, you know that they demand photo’s be taken of them in stupid positions.
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First of all, this is Bubbles receiving a head scratch, well, until we started holding her ears down obviously, to make her look dumb. She doesn’t mind! She just loves having her head scratched so she’ll let you get away with pretty much anything as long as you don’t stop. |
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Fiz just can’t help but climb into bags. Anywhere, any time, any bag. She loves them. She’ll sit in them for hours if she can, just watching the world of non-bag go by. |
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Here our two cats spend some quality time ‘together’. They kind of tolerate each other, proximity to food calms them down (the only time they’ll sit next to each other is while they eat), but once out in the garden, there has to be a regulation 10 feet between them otherwise it’s war. |
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This is Fiz’s second favourite place to sleep, on Grete’s shoulder like some demented parrot. She walks all over Grete’s desk, face, shoulders, head and lap until Grete finally relents and lets he lie like this. It only ends when Grete’s arm is so numb she can’t hold it there any longer. |
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And here was have Fiz’s first favourite place to sleep. On the back of the sofa in the lounge, which usually has some kind of blanket draped over it, while we sit on the sofa and watch TV. She stretches out her full length and slowly slips behind the cushions, pushing us further and further off the sofa. Sometimes it takes her minutes to actually crawl back out of there when we get up to leave. |
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Despite the fact that the whole house is cat friendly and there’s a lot of soft furnishings, the cats just love to kip in awkward places. Bubbles is sleeping on the third shelf of the unit in the dining room, mere inches from the top of their soft, plush cat furniture, and on top of a bunch of pointy plastic miniatures (HeroQuest)! They both take turns kipping here, especially when it’s raining outside for some reason. |
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Bubbles just loves the sun! This is her in the middle of the year taking in some rays, on her back, looking fat as usual. She lies like this, with her fluffy tummy on show until you’re dragged in and forced to tickle her, at which point she closes all four paws on you like some demented furry Venus fly-trap and savages your arm. |
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And lastly Bubbles, in the cat-pike position. Back legs out straight, front legs grabbing them, head tucked in. Only the Russian judge gives her less than a 10.0. |
Redefine success
When you’re overweight and diabetic, when you know you should be losing weight and controlling what you eat, ordering take-away food could be seen as failure. It certainly feels like failing. It doesn’t mean I don’t do it – and in fact, because I feel like it’s failing I usually end up ordering the worst possible thing (more calories than you can shake a stick at), because since I’m failing, fuck it, might as well fail in style.
But it’s not a good place to be mentally. Food and emotions are already tied together too much (feeling good, why not eat to celebrate, feeling down, why not eat to cheer yourself up, eaten too much, better feel guilty, feeling guilty, why not eat to cheer yourself up. repeat). So feeling like a failure every time you order take-away food doesn’t help, it just drives the circle even faster.
So I decided to redefine success.
Now, the normal position is ordering take-away food. That’s normal. Success is not ordering take-away food. There is no failure option. Every day I don’t order take-away is a success. I’ve achieved a goal. I eat the chicken and veg or whatever other bloody meal I can pretend to enjoy and I succeed. If I get take-away then that’s okay, it’s normal. Tomorrow I have another chance at success.
It’s a much better head-space to be in. Might feel like cheating, but I think that it doesn’t matter. You have to be in control of how you feel to some extent, in order to manage what you eat and actually survive. If I have to cheat by moving the goal posts to do that then I will. It hasn’t (and won’t) lead to me eating more take-away food, but it’ll certainly lead to me not feeling so bad about it if I do (which in turn means I don’t eat even more crap), and every day I eat something boring and tedious and with the vague semblance of being healthy I’ll feel like I made progress rather than being stuck with the status quo.
Is this a newt I see before me?
Took this shot in July on the concrete just outside the house. We don’t have a pond, although we see a lot of frogs in the garden so there must be water somewhere within reach. I think it’s an English common newt.
Some folk might be wondering ‘yes, a newt, so what’, but we don’t really see much wildlife in the middle of this part of Nottingham, so it’s always nice to see something alive in the garden that isn’t just a slug.
Which leads to these photo’s. Two slugs in August, hanging out on the patio. The book is for size reference (it’s a regular paperback), not something they were reading at the time (although the title, an accident, is somewhat amusing).
That’s two different slugs, and probably the reason why one of our plants in the border just mysteriously vanished one night, without a trace.
The Guild, season 3, episode 1
The Guild in case you’ve never seen it. There are some spoilers in this episode for previous seasons obviously.