Watching: One more disk of Twin Peaks episodes left, plus another one of special features.  Started on Doctor Who Series 3, with "The Runaway Bride"...not sure if that was the best start, but it was okay.  Currently half an episode behind on "Outlander"--seriously, who does 90-minute episodes?  We also watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "The Winter Soldier", so we're almost caught up on Marvel.  I'm still conflicted over the "Days of Future Past" X-Men movie, though.  TV shows return next week, so I predict epic falling behind.

Reading: Finished The Talisman, it was okay; since then have reread David Gerrold's Bouncing Off The Moon (second in the series; a lot of lunar travelogue, not a lot of plot advancement), read Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Knights of Crystallia (third in the series; still amusing, but it had some slow spots) and Diana Pharaoh Francis's Bitter Night (first in the series; kickass start and excellent tension and pacing, with the exception of one "characters captured too easily" sequence, will read more).  I also did a reread of Buffy Season 8 comics, and discovered I had the first collection of Season 9 but not more, so I picked up a second Season 9 collection today.  The plot had some serious "Oh, really?" moments in it, though.

I've just started S.M. Stirling's The Sword of The Lady, sixth in its series, and having a little trouble getting back into the series, since I read the previous book in 2008.  (Coincidentally, it seems like I may have bought it at the same time as Bitter Night...)

Listening: The usual random stuff.  Nothing really notable for new stuff, a few albums from eMusic that sounded okay based on samples (Lore, Black City Lights), plus an EP from Eliza Rickman heavily featuring toy-piano instrumentation.

Playing: On the computer, I've been going back and forth.  I had a big surge of Morrowind a few months ago, where I finished the main plot with my Character #3 (the Argonian mage, Speaker-to-Animals) but started to bog down in the expansion pack plots.  I've also just recently finished the main plotline in Skyrim for the first time (I was very close), but again, bogging down in other quests.  Rogue Legacy is good when I want to kill a few minutes here and there, and I've still got old standbys like Spider (where my win rate is about 31%, by the way), Sherlock, and Solitude (a big card-solitaire pack).  A few weeks ago I even dug deep into the past and played a couple of games of Empire--the old one, early 80's, from when it had just been ported to the new IBM PC.  I still enjoy that from time to time, even though by this point it's almost zenlike.

But if I do pick a big game to play, at this point it's like to be either Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV.  I got started on CK2 a while ago, and have just finished my third game of it.  It's occasionally highly frustrating, but I love the scope of it, and also the scale, where I can get down to the level of individual people, and then arrange their marriages for them and stuff.  It's been very educational history-wise, too.  In my first game, I started as Earl Godfrey Ivaring of the Isle of Man, and followed the Ivarings through to the peak of their success, King Pridbjorn of Scotland and Ireland...and then back down to a single county again.  My second game was somewhat better--I started as Count Aner de Marsan from southwest France, and ended up growing more steadily up to becoming things like Duke of Brittany, King of Castile, and finally Emperor of Hispania...which I kept until the very end of the game.

My last game (the third, or at least the third I finished) I was trying to play in "Ironman" mode, which is a) designed to keep you from tampering with your save files, and b) the only way you can get online "Achivements" on Steam; I picked, at random, Count Radislav Kometopoulos of Dorostotum, on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in modern Bulgaria.  This game also had some ups and downs--in fact, I actually "lost" at some point as my only heiress had foolishly not married matrilineally, and so my titles passed into the hands of another dynasty.  I was able to keep playing as that dynasty, though, and the Shishmans had a little more success, at one point even managing to become Kings of Bulgaria and achieve their independence from the Empire.  Being independent from the Empire while enclosed by it was a little bit stifling, though, so I stupidly decided to rejoin the Empire, even though the Empress hated my guts, and so she systematically stripped everything away until I was left with very little, and was unable to regain much of it before the end of the game.  I've just tried starting one with the "Old Gods" expansion, as Estonian pagans back in 867, but I'm still on my starting character for that one.

This being me, I also had chracter naming schemes for each game--well, for the first game, I let it pick the names for me, just to see what I would get.  But the second one, I went through an alphabetical list, first using standard Occitan/Frankish/Basque flavour names, and then using some custom ones (which is how I ended up with a King Azpiazu and an Emperor Ornigan).  To some extent I'm fascinated with the names different cultures use (Boson, for instance, was a well-known Occitan King, and "Eudes" is their form of "Otto"), I do like using my own, and I'm tickled when the built-in code for naming children after their parents or grandparents causes my custom names to be passed on for several generations (like the several Queriches descended from my original).  So for the Dorostotum game I used strictly names drawn from Steven Brust's Dragaera books, because some of them are vaguely Slavic, and I'd just been through them not that long ago reading them to Simon.  My new one, I was feeling whimsical, so, based on a recent conversation about the Order of the Stick "Polearm Shop Sketch", I'm naming my children after polearms and/or types of cheese.  (Having just finished one of Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz books, I anticipate moving on from there to prisons and mountains when I get tired of those.)

I'm not quite as fond of Europa Universalis IV (EU4, henceforth).  It doesn't do as much on a person level, being more nation-oriented.  I enjoyed my first game of it as Castile mostly because I got to colonize large chunks of the world.  Castile ended up with most of northwest Africa, Australia, a lot of South America, the Pacific Northwest, bits of the African coast, islands in the Indian and the Pacific...  It was almost as interesting to see what other nations got.  Mexico was British; a lot of Canada was Breton (which is great, I love Brittany); Florida was Norwegian.  None of the colonies actually became independent, but then I don't have that expansion pack yet.  I never got to unify with Aragon, though; I skipped the obviously-planned "Royal Marriage" event, and I never got that good a chance again.  So no Spain, just Castile.  (Aragon didn't get any colonies.  Ha!)  I've started a second game as France, which is not quite as fun, especially since I discovered how severe an advantage Portugal and Castile have in getting a head start on colonization.  Plus the religious wars are kicking my ass, as Catholic and Protestant and Heretic armies keep rising up and laying waste to the countryside.

But then I got the plugin that lets me export CK2 games as EU4 mods, so you can basically continue your games...and that's been more interesting.  I took my Emperor of Hispania game and have been playing as Emperor of Spain, which has been fairly fun.  My Spain started out with all of the Iberian peninsula, as well as Aquitaine, Brittany, most of the rest of France, and little bits here and there in the Holy Roman Empire, and even bits of the British Isles.  I get to do the lion's share of the colonizing, because there's not even a Portugal or France to compete with.  There was Scotland, but it was mostly concerned with winning the rest of England back from the Aztecs.  Oh, yeah, the Aztecs conquered England, thanks to a CK2 mod called "Sunset Empire".  And then I ended up King of Scotland too, through a royal marriage, and now that's all part of Spain too.  So the poor Holy Roman Empire has been getting squeezed between me on the west, Lithuania on the east, and Byzantium in the south, so it's really starting to fall apart.  Flanders and Holland have been doing a little bit of colonization (as well as scattered bits like Hwicce and Orkney, but I've engulfed those too.)

I also had a CK2 game where, through the use of extensive cheat codes, I managed to conquer most of the map with the Empire of Brittania, just to see if it was theoretically possible.  I bogged down when my only remaining opponent was the Mongol Ilkhanate, because I kept having to wait ten years for truces to expire...  Anyway, I exported that map into EU4 as well, and now I'm trying to make the rest of the world British too, without further cheat codes, to see if that's possible.  It diverts me, and I don't have to worry about losing battles all that much, just dealing with overextension as I try to integrate my new possessions...

Playing Mass Effect #1. I am frustrated and annoyed because:

1) the autosave is inconsistent. For example, no autosave before the matriarch battle, one in a mid battle cut scene, none after the battle. I could cope if there were no autosave, but the inconsistency has cost me a couple hours now.

2) moving my avatar around the battlefield during cut scenes. In a game where squad tactics and cover are  everything, this is a high crime. 

3) even worse, during 2) blowing my cover or making me adopt stupid tactics that make no sense given prior events. 

4) learn by dying (not doing). Games that can't be won except by discovering through death all the ways a situation will kill until you find the way it doesn't are poorly designed. 

I'm still playing because the story is engaging, but I'm not best pleased.

I just took a two-hour kizomba dance workshop with Manuel Dos Santos and Flavie, visiting from Montreal. Which is funny because we barely missed meeting them during our Montreal vacation this summer.

Manuel is a born entertainer, but he also has a rarer talent: he knows how to teach adults.

The thing about adults is that we usually don't have to be in that class. Sure, we'll miss out on something if we don't show up, but we have other choices. And we will exercise them if we don't feel good about what's happening.

To teach adults effectively, you gotta:

• Take the temperature of the room. Pitch your instruction to that level of skill.
• Take time to reemphasize things until they stick.
• Make sure people aren't frustrated.
• Make sure people aren't bored. (Quite a balancing act, there.)
• Keep 'em laughing, but not too distracted (see "bored" and "frustrated").

Manuel started off by blowing our minds with five minutes of kudoro— a high-energy but surprisingly easy step, as a warmup. Everybody feels good: check!

Then he asked us all to just dance for a minute, to gauge our level of skill with kizomba (hint: not a lot yet).

And then, he taught us two incredibly simple moves... and we did then for ten minutes at least, until he knew we had the feeling of the thing right. But he made sure we switched to dancing those moves together with a partner almost immediately. Because, y'know, that's the fun part.

And then he introduced the ladies' exit— the most important move in kizomba, the bit almost everything else is based on. And we drilled that for a long, long time...

And then we learned all sorts of things. And nearly all of us decided to stay for that second hour. Because we felt we were really getting it.

Toward the end, he threw in some slightly more advanced material. But he also quietly dropped one move when he saw the room react to it. Save that for another time. Teach the room you're in.

He's teaching the workshop again tomorrow out at La Luna in Bensalem. If I were free I'd go again.

My cat is snoring so loudly I'm wondering how he isn't waking himself up. It's really quite comical.

Today I cleaned up the house a little, slept a lot, cleaned up the house a little more, took a short walk with the fuzz-bucket, and here I am ready for sleep again. Tomorrow I see my one brother and his 6-week-old and the rest of the gang. Apparently there's all kinds of new trendy stuff now that comes with having babies: "push presents" and "baby introduction" parties. Man, I am out of the loop anymore.

Anyway, I get to hold a baby tomorrow, see the fam, and eat some noms. Babies are fun when they're that small. They don't do much but lay around and make funny noises. Kinda like cats.

As stated in my previous communique', for readers who don't have time for me to suggest a novel.

A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman. Sherlock Holmes horror pastiche'.  It's free, short, and fantastic.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

The line between obvious and impossible can seem pretty thin at times.  What capability should your computer have that could be accomplished by a single individual in a reasonable time frame?

What a difference getting that BIG THING out of the way can make.

Last night I finished a week-long slog at work, bashing out a feature I'm tired of even thinking about. (It happens, even at the coolest job ever.) Today I got to work on... SOMETHING ELSE! I knocked out SOMETHING ELSE in one day. Because I was that happy to do something new for a change.

Speaking of which, today One Post Wonder got:

Email notifications. I was so nervous about enabling this, but the response has been very positive. You will receive no more than one per day, and you won't receive anything you already saw in your bellbox.

YouTube videos. Well, they worked before, but not if you used the youtu.be shortcut link.

Poetry. Specifically, if you press "shift-enter," you get a line break instead of a paragraph break. If you paste plain text from a text editor, you also get line breaks. And when you post, you'll find your line breaks stay in there! That's the really new bit.

Faster. Not to bore you with the details, but when you clicked on a notice in the bellbox, there was a noticeable pause while One Post Wonder loaded certain things all over again. Now we only load 'em once. Zoom zoom.

But this does not mean I won't be returning to the issue of locks. Sean and Dawn made a very convincing case for making things just a little more flexible, so that it's possible to avoid reading your aunt's unfortunate birther tirades while still giving her access to the baby pictures. Because you're just that good a person. We have a design solution in mind that won't add any extra work, apart from a moment's thought when you stop following someone. And hopefully you don't do that every day. Right?

"Kittens where kittens go yet do not belong", (C) Sean M Puckett 2014

These are the siblings we added to the menagerie last year. They're bigger now but this is the best recent photo I have of the two of them at once. It took a long time to be able to tell them apart and even now we're just at 95%. Easiest way at first to be certain was to either see the splotches on Vash's cheek or haunch, or by touch; Vash's fur is coarser while Spike's is quite silky.

These days they're almost trivial to differentiate as Vash outweighs Spike by a couple pounds and it seems to be all muscle, which you might think is an advantage in wrassling except that Spike is whip-lithe and has at least twice as much energy. 

Twenty internet quatloos if you can give me their full names.

Stress can promote creativity.  My sister in law had a stroke last night and right now me and Ami are focused on getting through the day so we can drive up to Austin to check in on her. 

During this time, I managed to record an audio track for the Stars and Garters Burlesque show stuff (two spots - one commercial for "Tobias the Adequate Magic TV Cards" and one where I argue with the announcer about whether I'm going to do a really dangerous trick or not in the second half) and get that sent off. 

Whee. 

My goals for today: clean sheets, vaccum, shower and get out of the house. If I am successful, maybe I'll even come back and add to this post.

What are your goals for today and how far are you?