Jack is a cat of our aquaintance. (He lives here, in the house, and we're responsible for him. For the record his full name is Dr. Isaac Ezekiel "Jack" Jones. Our cats get names. But I digress.)

We're not sure of his specific provenance, except that he came from the cat rescue. He's a brown tabby of middling size with a few notches out of his ears and a slash on his nose. His colouration is different than other tabbies, though -- he has brown "points", like a Siamese. His ear tips are dark, his feet are dark, his tail is dark. I suspect, but don't know, that he's half Siamese.

I don't know all of the attributes of Siamese cats; I've never made their acquaintance in person that I can recall. But the rumours are that they're very talkative. Vocal. You know. Saying cat words and cat phrases. A lot. And repeatedly. But I think because Jack has some Siamese in him, that he is also predisposed to being vocal. Although not to excess. Except sometimes.

What it comes down to this: Jack mutters. 

He wanders through the house at times, asking questions of doors, of shadows, of doorways, of shafts of light, of furniture, of stairs, of landings, of the middle of rooms, of hallways, of closets, of foyers, of bathrooms, of bedrooms, of clutter, of dust bunnies, of the absence of dust bunnies, of almost everything.

Which is why sometimes you might hear me say "Jack, shut up!"  Because sometimes he will go on, and on, and on, and on. And talking to the muttering cat usually works to stop him muttering, at least for a while.

Because the question he seems to be asking, when he's muttering, is "am I alone? Where is everyone?"  

And sometimes, when we can say it truthfully, we'll answer him, "We're upstairs, Jack, in the bed!" 

And then he'll trot up the stairs and jump up on the bed and purr.

You'll probably see that subject line again.

I felt today the first flirtatious kiss of winter upon my nape. A chill, in the air; in the house. The temperature in the dining room was 18C this morning. I expect and prepare for a freshening outside as the days shorten even while they're still just longer than the nights. This is Canada after all. But inside, and first half September, it's not only unwelcome-it's always unwelcome-it's unexpected. Measures were taken; long sleeves adorned, fleece slippers retrieved from the lurking places of cats.

But I write today to complain of hunger. The hunger of "winter is coming." The furnace in the core of my self that banked for summer's heat is now remembering what it is to stoke and to demand fuel. The hunger that isn't slaked by a contented belly so much as by an inability to eat any more. The hunger that makes my jaws clench at nothing and my teeth ache to rend fatty flesh. And cheap chocolate. (That last bit may be triggering.) 

The hunger of eat, or die.

This is pretty much what I've been playing this year.

I played Dark Souls II through a couple times but got fed up with the non-Miyazaki nature of the storyline, which basically boils down to "jilted woman loses her shit." And some other random misogyny. Also while some of the levels are really great, others were really phoned in. Kind of like Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith in the first. So that was kind of a letdown. I really think Demon's Souls is the best of the three of them for environment. I'm really hoping Bloodborne (which is where Miyazaki focused his time instead of paying attention to DkS2) steers much more back in the DeS direction, and if there's a bit of Silent Hill horror in there that won't be a bad thing either. 

I bought Reckoning/Amalur/Kingdom whatever that thing that 38 Studios (the big clusturfuck in Delaware) made; it was $5 on sale and seemed like it might be a kind of fun sort of actiony RPG thing to pass the time with. I started it on hard mode, because I have low expectations for a US studio title. I wish it would actually get hard. I'm not even using magic. It's certainly got a big world, but it's just so effing boring after 60 hours. It doesn't have the drama of a Final Fantasy plot so it's mostly just grind through whatever step-and-fetchit quests you can tolerate and smack the baddies now and then.

Hohokum was very pleasant but doesn't have much replayability. It's kind of a "busy box" sort of game. Once you've pushed all the buttons and seen all the little cutscenes, there's not much more to it. I love the soundtrack, though. And the art style is super cute. I recommend this game highly as a diversion or something to haul out and get lost in when you're slightly altered. (I wasn't able to get the two apparently female figures to marry, though. That irritated me.)

Child of Eden I wrote about in another venue. Basically REZ, but with a video damsel to save, which really kind of ruins it for me. Not what I want in my techno rail shooter. At all. I'll keep poking at it, though.

I also played ThatGameCompany's Flower and Journey, which are mellow, score-less, exploration-driven, quest-type pastimes. They are games in that there are objectives and gradually increasing difficulty in completing them. But they seem to focus more on environmental enjoyment and just flying or wandering around in surreal, minimalist landscapes. Nice soundtracks and pleasant visuals, and some interesting play mechanics, but I didn't find them really compelling in any ongoing way. (Perhaps this is best signified by the fact that I forgot to write them up last night when I originally created this post.)

I just started American McGee's Alice (as a bonus pack-in to Alice: Madness Returns; I haven't played it yet) runs on the Quake III engine, which should give you an idea of how ancient it is. I actually died several times, though mostly from issues related to its remapping of a mouse view/keyboard strafe model to the controller. I started doing much better when I discovered the shoulder buttons would shoot as well, saving me from "claw" grip.

I also just started Mass Effect, which I've never played before and know very little about. Of course I'm playing as a woman; I always do when presented with a choice. I usually stay away from western shooters because of misogyny & patriarchy issues but reports are that BioWare did pretty well on this series so when the trilogy came on sale for $20 I decided to go for it. I'm just a couple hours in but it feels rather too linear for my taste. We'll see how it goes after 20 or however long it takes.

I picked up Trine 2 for a couple bucks, and while I have to say the visuals are really extraordinarily beautiful, the gameplay is wrenchingly dull. It reminds me of The Incredible Machine or Contraptions or other things like that where you have a bucket of tools and have to figure out what super secret combination of them will get you through the next screen. These kind of puzzles almost always devolve into "solve it our way or get stuffed." Yeah, sure, here's a sequence for ya, which number comes next: 6 21 3 11 15 6 _. I'll probably gnaw through it 20 minutes at a time just because I'm stubborn.

I loved Dragon's Dogma, almost everything about it, except that I think the damage equations are improperly coded with a logit rather than sigmoidal shape, so there's only a narrow range of player levels where you are evenly matched with your foes -- much higher than them and they are like paper, much lower and it's like punching granite. A sigmoid function, akin to what the Souls series provides, would provide many more opportunities for challenging interactions. I'd probably still be playing it if all of my characters didn't basically get to the point of "press X to win".  Special mention for the goblins in this game -- absolute best characterization I've seen in a foe in any game so far.

D mostly is playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, also known as "the RPG Westerners Hate Because It Doesn't Spoon-Feed You A Plot And It Has Non-Linear Gameplay." We're grooving on it pretty well, though I personally could do without the pseudo-Pokemon thing. 

When Mass Effect is done, there's ME2 and ME3, and when Alice is done there's Madness Returns, so my Winter videogaming needs are fairly well seen to, assuming I don't just burn through them all before the Solstice. I might consider Dragon Age Inquisition, but the previous titles have been problematic in some ways so I'll hold off until I know what I'd be getting into. Apparently Capcom is doing something called Deep Down but reports are it won't even have a female option for the lead so that's not going to work.

I'm looking forward to No Man's Sky, the procedurally generated galaxy explorer, and whichever of that or Bloodborne releases first will be the impetus for us to get a PS4 -- all of the titles I've mentioned I play on our PS3.

So that's kind of where I'm at for gaming!

Egg farts.

Two more words: offended cats.

I like frozen treats like ice cream, but I do try to stay away from dairy as it sometimes ... well, that's not important. At least not to you. 

RIGHT so

Ice-cream-like frozen treat without dairy, which pretty much means sorbet. Which is frozen fruit juice. But instead of buying fruit juice in a jug, which is too thin really, buy it in the little cans of concentrate, generally in the freezer section of the grocery store.

Here's the tools you need.

• Ice cream freezer
• Stick (or other mechanical) blender

So here's the recipe.

• One can of frozen concentrated fruit juice. Any kind will do.
• One can of water (same can, just fill it up)

Just dump those in a big mixing bowl, and in a separate small container add

• 1/4 cup of white granulated sugar
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of xanthan gum powder

The xanthan gum is important as it takes the place of the milk solids and dairy fats which, in ice cream, get in the way of large (unpleasant) ice crystal formation. With xanthan gum, you get bajillions of tiny entrained air bubbles, which do about the same thing and makes the end product almost fluffy. If you want a more solid product, use less, but probably not less than 1/4, which is about where it starts having a useful effect. 

The trickiest bit is mixing in the xanthan gum, because as soon as you drop it in water it turns into goo. What seems to work pretty well is adding the gum powder to the white sugar granules and stirring that up really good, then adding a little water to the sugar and then stirring that up, then scraping the resulting goo into the juice and water. Use a blender to mix it all up real good. (I don't think hand mixing is going to properly disperse the gum.)

Pour it into your ice cream freezer and let the magic happen.

I like making sorbet from the cans of concentrate rather than from ready-to-drink fruit juice because I get a much stronger flavour. 

I've made most of the flavours (punch, berry, lemon, lime) available in the stores, except grape and orange. I haven't gotten to orange yet, and I dunno about grape sorbet. Maybe you'll take that chance, and report back, for the good of society.

I think it's interesting how in the West we often pigeonhole people based on what they "do" -- like "oh, Bob's a Dentist" -- and I think that's really kind of unfair. 

So, at the risk of seeming douchey, here's a list of things I do with reasonable competency. Basically what things I either have or would be comfortable accepting money to do.

• Computer programming, including analysis and architecture. 
• UX and visual design, typically for printed communication or UI purposes.
• Systems analysis and solution synthesis in a broad range of arenas.
• Homebuilding stuff, including construction, trim, plumbing and electrical.
• Cabinetmaking, furniture building and wood turning; chunky but functional.
• Vocal performance, both spoken (books/VO) and sung.
• Theatrical performance, both on stage and in front of a camera.
• Writing, both original (essay length) and adaptation.
• Event, portrait, landscape, architectural, art and repro photography. 
• Digital image processing and retouching, as in "Photoshop".
• High end hardcopy photo production (gallery quality prints).
• Instruction of many (but not all) of the above skills, 1-on-1 or group.
• Managing people in doing many (but not all) of the above tasks.

There's a longer list of things that I do at a novice level or just to save paying a professional to do; stuff I wouldn't do for someone else for money. 

Anyway --- what do you do?

Considering this a "getting to know you" kind of shared discourse, feel free to post your answer in your own journal -- you don't have to answer in my comments, though you may want to say "hey read my journal!" 

I don't recall any role models from my youth (70s-80s) that reflected the person that I was, or seemed to want to become, or in fact became today.

As a tall white adolescent male in the United States of that era all of my look-alikes on TV and in the movies and books were either alpha-males, tragically failed alpha-males (including nerds, scientists, the mentally ill, clowns and comic relief), or villains.

This is the white patriarchy at work breeding the new generation, of course. If you're a white man, and you're not in charge (either a good boss or a bad boss), you're a fuck-up.

There may have been the occasional funny or clever shy introvert in an ensemble cast presented at least in a non-disparaging way, but really I'm hard pressed to think of an example other than Mission Impossible where everyone's traits were considered useful, no matter how non-mainstream (And Barney the genius electronics guy was black, too, which was pretty good for the era).

Most media was (and continues to be) about The Alpha Guy doing Alpha Stuff in an Alpha Way. 

I think perhaps one of the reasons guys of a certain age who don't do a lot of introspection have a hard time with feminism is because they just don't know how to act in a world where people who look like them aren't always the Alpha Guy doing Alpha Stuff in an Alpha Way.

Most of the time people just play the role they learned before they were 20. If they never learned a role other than Alpha Guy, even if they're shitty at playing it, they will probably find it hard to play another role.  (Which is a reason, not an excuse.) 

So, I encourage the creation of media where there are positive role models for all personality types as well as genders and ethnicities. And it's good to see that this is happening, to some degree, in modern media. But I think there's a lot more to be done. As there is with every other aspect of feminism.

When my partner and I sit down to play Final Fantasy RPGs together (one person driving, one person navigating or commenting), sometimes about when one of us gets bored/fed-up, the other one will be quite interested and eager to play. So the controller gets handed over and the driver/navigator roles switch. And sometimes, when the new driver gets bored, the navigator will be keen to drive once again.

Occasionally, like tonight, this role swapping will go back and forth several times, causing video game sessions hours longer than they would otherwise naturally be if only one person was (sensibly) playing until they were bored and then stopping.

It's not like FFn is particularly riveting, it's just kind of got that scratch-an-itchiness about it that suggests that just a couple minutes more might be nice. And then it's an hour past your bedtime.

It's okay, we're adults, we can stop any time. 

Last night I fell asleep dreaming of pixels. Two of them. Two pixels. Well, one, and then two. Actually, last night I fell asleep thinking I should get up and work on the fucking pixels because the work I was doing on sleep wasn't going very well either.

But then it was morning. Which was good.

Chrome, you see, had two pixels, Safari had zero, and Firefox had one. (Which is hilarious in a way because Safari and Chrome are almost the same browser.) CSS is supposed to make these problems not happen. But of course they do. Because designers need steady jobs, just like everyone else. (You're telling me that isn't someone's rationale?!) 

And what kind of struck me about CSS is that it's like a lot of things. You can be angry and harsh and define every fucking thing about every margin and div and font size and whatever and force it to be exactly what you want. Or you can be chill and zen and take the "yeah as long as it looks good, it doesn't have to be exactly the same on every browser" route.

Which as an attitude is in the long run much healthier for your soul. 

So what happens is when you finally decide that being angry about everything not being perfect just isn't going ever going to work and you strip out all the crap and start from scratch is just about when you find the zen-like magic incantation that not only gives you exactly what you were fighting for in the first place, but makes all of the browsers render it exactly the same way. (For the record, that would be putting the fixed font-size on the enclosing UL rather than the LI items within it.)

So that was my little bop on the nose from the Buddha for today.

(*CSS is cascading style sheets, a kind of computer language used to describe how a web page should look, as opposed to specifying what the content words & images should be.)

I think there's a tendency among readers of books to underestimate the value of a good editor. I know for many years I had no idea that books even needed to be edited. And then for a while being reviled at the thought that someone might dare to touch my words. 

But now I realize the value of having someone review your work and saying, "hey, that thing you're obviously in love with, it's okay to be in love with it, but no one else is really going to care that much, so cut it short, okay?" or "what the hell that doesn't make any sense?" or "TOOT TOOT hello I am the QE2 and I am going TOOT TOOT through your plot holes."

I'd like to think that as one's experience as an artistic creator progresses, one is able to look at one's own work with more objectivity and to easily accept the input of others. But then I'd also like to think that creating art should be about making what I want, not what anyone else wants, so fuck objectivity. Which put together have that great push/pull dynamic of any great chaotic system.

In conclusion, yay art and yay collaborators.