People is weird
I don’t work Wednesdays, so I spent an obscene amount of time playing the wizard game today. I’m happy to say the world is stuffed full of cats and you are allowed to pet them. I mean, they’re funky skinny cats (most illustrators just don’t do cats), but better than usual. And, I repeat, you can pet them.
Thinking I can’t be the only one to wonder how many cats there are and whether I get an achievement for petting them all, I had a little google. Turns out, people are big mad that other people like the cats.
Just a heads up, Hogwarts Legacy isn’t a cat collecting sim. But, if you’re prowling around for a purr-fect count, the game doesn’t specify. It’s more about wizards and spells than tallying tails.
Honestly, Hogwarts Legacy is all about that wizarding world charm, not keeping a kitty census.
And then there’s this peculiar article, written as though the wizarding world is a real thing with actual rules, that warns you not to pet the cats because they might be some creepy old wizard pretending to be a cat.
In the game, cats are not meant to be pet as the petting feature suggests, they are meant to practice Avada Kedavra on.
“Don’t pet them, cast the forbidden dark magic murder spell on them instead!” is certainly a take. Honestly, what did I expect from a site called comicbook.com?
I know what I’m playing next. It’s supposed to be gorgeous in VR.
April 24, 2024 — 7:54 pm
Comments: 2
The ones that don’t land
I have an Early Bird Special story. When I was working corporate in the States, there was a shopping center next door that had various eateries and office supply stores. That kind of thing. It had a restaurant popular with the Early Bird Special crowd and we were accustomed to see it lit up with wrinklies first thing in the morning.
I’d gone over for…staples or some shit before work and I was walking back across this very parking lot. Wearing my novelty CORONER t-shirt.
Oh, dear. I was approached by a small group of tiny nervous grandmas and asked if there was a problem. TBH, I felt genuinely shit about it and never wore that shirt again. The things you think are funny when you’re 25.
I’m sure there’s AI that will be able to identify this parking lot in the next six months. I had a real Google Maps adventure finding it myself. Dumber than AI, me.
It seems as though my old company has sold off quite a lot of what used to be a big campus. I know they’re not hurting for money so it must be a strategic financial decision.
Another evening lost exploring Google Maps. It’s even more fun in VR!
Oh, yeah – our internet is fixed.
April 23, 2024 — 7:55 pm
Comments: 4
Aw, bless
If you click the article, you do get the full mugshot, but I love the way sussex.news crops the pictures on the front page so it looks like we’re arresting toddlers for serious crimes.
Still no internet. As it turns out, it’s only £3 a gigabyte to top up, but you can easily use a gig a day browsing the internet. Okay, that’s still not a lot of money, but it feels like a rip.
We don’t have them here, but it looks like I’ve reached the Early Bird Specials stage of life.
April 22, 2024 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 4
She took her time, didn’t she?
Okay, I can put up with thirty years of it, but after that? I am done!
Actually, I think most of those advice letters are fake. At least, the ones in porn magazines are – I know somebody who used to write them.
Meanwhile, they tell us it could be Thursday before our internet is back. Because they have to use a cherry picker on a busy road, they have to do a survey first. I think it has to do with who controls the road (the county council or the Highways Agency). I am unclear.
All’s I know is, my YouTube addiction is on hold while we pay per byte. Good weekend, everyone!
April 19, 2024 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 6
They’re still finding ’em
More ordnance dug up on Sussex beaches this month. There’s still an insane amount of it out there. I don’t know that I’d handle those big ones – they look unstable.
More on the ‘splodey part. The boys like the ‘splodey part.
We’re still connecting through our phones. The engineer turned up this morning and said, “this is a job for a cherry picker!” and the cherry picker guy turned up and said, “this is a job for traffic control!”
So with any luck, tomorrow our road will be blocked by professionals while the cherry picker guy reattaches the phone wire on top of our pole. I feel important.
Also, our power is going off tomorrow morning for completely unrelated reasons. Wheee!
April 18, 2024 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 3
Saved!
Our landline rang this afternoon – a rare thing these days – and just as Uncle B answered it, our phone line died. Phone, internet, all of it. A spooky crackly sound came out of the receiver and that’s it.
We know who called. It was a living person, not a dead pet or anything.
A brief conversation with our supplier later, and they’re sending an engineer in the morning. It’s just us, so something physical probably happened to our line. It’s been hella windy lately.
No internet for the evening? That’s unpossible! Have you tried turning your phone into a hotspot? Turns out it’s super easy. You just poke that button in the picture.
The first time I did, it I had to set up a name and password (name: weaselfone password: mustelid. Help yourself). It’s painless and almost quicker than our router. I recommend it in a pinch.
But of course, it’s burning data, so I won’t linger.
April 17, 2024 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 4
I have come to the conclusion I am below average :(
Hello, frens. I played my game instead of coming up with something interesting to post tonight, in a pattern that has repeated in my life for upwards of six decades.
I’ve come to the conclusion I’m quite bad at vidya game combat. I’ve hated boss fights increasingly in recent years and finally had to nerf this one right down to easy mode to beat the big battles.
I’m supposed to have killed, like, five trolls by now, but any trolls I find bound across the room and smash me to jelly with one good whomp. Humiliating.
I keep taunting myself that this is a game for literal children, but I’m not so sure. The game and the rig to run it properly are not cheap and I wonder how many middle schoolers are playing.
Also Deek, my house elf, has been told to teach me how to breed magical animals. He has instructed me to capture one male and one female Thestral and buy blueprints for a breeding pen.
I’m dreading this.
April 16, 2024 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 4
Yes, I believe they would
Have you switched (I won’t say upgraded) to Windows 11 yet? I’ve got two machines running it at work and I can’t see much difference.
The Notepad has multiple tabs now and doesn’t automatically close the file when you close the program. There’s that. I use Notepad a lot, so I noticed it right away.
But the main thing is they moved the Windows key – the one you click to open programs – from the left corner to the middle left. Doesn’t sound like much, does it?
But they didn’t leave the left corner empty. Oh, no. There they put a news aggregator. So however many times a day you go to open a program and poke that corner by force of habit, you get a faceful of Microsoft-approved headlines.
I learned pretty fast not to do that. Mainstream news! Brrrr.
Do I think Microsoft would make a whole ‘nother operating system just to try and steer everyone’s news consumption? Yes I do.
By the way, Windows 11 updates on exactly the same schedule as all my Windows 10 machines. I bet there aren’t many differences under the hood.
April 15, 2024 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 9
Ha ha! The wizard game has a real-world problem
The Hogwarts game has an insurmountable problem: it’s set in a mythic English public school. To work, it has to be stereotypically English, and aggressively so. But white people are bad, m’kay? and must never be allowed to congregate without brown chaperones. Goodness me, English people are like turbo white people. What to do?
You can accept an African or Indian professor because I guess a school of magic would want representation from other magical traditions (lookit me, taking the world building seriously!). But when the student body is more brown than white, you start to wonder if you’re really in Albion any more. Subvert expectations too far and you’ll break them.
This is happening in meat-space, too. There’s a school near us that attracts a high number of foreign students. It isn’t a terribly good school, but Johnny Foreigner doesn’t know that. It has smart school uniforms and a horse riding program and it looks like Hogwarts inside. That still has cachet around the world whether our masters like it or not.
I read that the school has a target of…either minimum 40% English students or maximum 40% non-English students. I forget which. They struggle to maintain it.
It’s hilarious to see something marketed for its whiteness and Englishness, particularly when I know for a fact they’re exaggerating the whiteness and Englishness because whiteness and Englishness is their main selling point.
p.s. This is a very fun game in spite of itself.
p.p.s. I screwed up somewhere along the line and gave myself pink hair.
p.p.p.s. Good weekend!
April 12, 2024 — 7:06 pm
Comments: 6
They’ll grow anything here
Giant redwood trees were imported into the UK in the 1850s. They became a status symbol and were often planted at the gates of great parks, cemeteries and estates. As a result, there are half a million giant sequoia growing Britain today. There are 80,000 in California.
Many of Britain’s trees are known specimens – they know when and where they were planted. Knowing the growth rate, they’ve been able to determine the trees do just fine in the English climate.
And they’re still planting ’em. Greenies love them because they suck up so much CO2. At 150, though, none of them have yet reached ‘giant’ status – not like the ones we saw in those old postcards from the Fifties, anyway.
We have to go out tonight, so I’ll leave you with that happy tree-hugging thought.
April 11, 2024 — 2:56 pm
Comments: 7