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On Saturday morning, around 9:30am, Bo started crying in the bedroom. We came to him (all of us, even Luke), and found him unwilling to move, clearly unhappy. Luke tried playing with him, but Bo wasn’t interested. Finally, Luke just settled for cleaning him thoroughly. We brought him to the vet at noon – he had moved a bit in the intervening time, to be near to people, but was still not doing well.
The vet noted his temp was low, and he was pale. Blood tests and X rays turned up nothing; at this point the theory at hand was that he’d eaten a string or somesuch – apparently the body doesn’t do well trying to digest something a foot long. The vet, unable to find something certain, but concerned, recommended we take Bo to the emergency clinic.
We did – took him up there, had the vet there check him out, and she quickly came back with a much more serious diagnosis – Bo had very poor circulation in his hind legs and wasn’t able to use them very well. She also looked at the X ray film and noted his heart wasn’t the right shape. The new theory was that his heart was failing, and he’d thrown a clot. If we could keep him healthy for a week or so, a cardiac ultrasound would be the next diagnostic step. Meanwhile, he was kept overnight at the clinic for observation. When I visited him before I left, he’d been given pain medication and IV fluids, and was pulling himself around the cage on his forelegs, his hind legs barely able to help.
We got a call last night around 10 that he’d progressed to full paralysis of the legs, but that his bowels and tail were still working.
This morning, nothing had changed, but he wasn’t doing well. The doctor explained that the prognosis really wasn’t all that good – blood thinners for cats don’t work very reliably, she said, and even if they did dissolve the clot, he’d likely be permanently incapacitated, on dangerous blood thinners, and we’d have no knowing when another clot would do more damage. As she explained the increasingly long-shot diagnostic steps, I had the appalling realization that we were losing him. That the cat we’d welcomed into our lives and our hearts was going to die before he’d even been here two years.
Becky and I went in together to say goodbye. He was listless, and had only gotten worse, even in the hour since I’d spoken with the vet on the phone. He was ours, though, and, bawling, we stayed with him to the end.
God bless you, Bo.
Share on Facebook (crossposted from The Dream Library)
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The following shall be considered More RPG Geekery.
With Eloria – Erich’s long-running world – ramping up, I’ve been getting familiar with the system he chose for this era – a lightweight pulp-oriented game by the name of Savage Worlds. Obviously, until I either run it significantly (I’m ramping up a small game in the Slipstream setting for this purpose) or get knee deep in Elorian play, I’m not going to know it fully. However, it’s got a striking appeal on the face of it.
Any idiot system can pull off skill challenges without causing brain hemorrhages. Some do it with panache, some make you faintly ill. In Savage Worlds, the question is: Can you roll a 4 on a single die? Oh, you’re a PC? You get a d6 to bolster whatever other die you’re using. There’s some color mechanics, but if your players can’t count to 4? time to go play Candyland.
Combat’s always complicated. Savage Worlds incorporates a critical concept: everyone must be important in combat scenes! If you’re not a gunbunny, then you’re sticking a leg out to trip the NPC, or conning the mooks into giving you the MacGuffin. Using your Agility or Smarts to trick the bad guys is a core mechanic and has a heavy impact on the flow of the fight.
So yeah, I’m enjoying the system for its simplicity, style, and flexibility.
I’ve ranted on and off about how awesome Trail of Cthulhu is. I’ve also commented that I’m not sure it’s playable. Fundamentally, to me, that means ‘Not fun to play’, or ‘gets in the way of story’. The presentation Ken Hite and Robin Laws make of investigative RP and of the Mythos is flawless. My problem is that the system is a little too nonintuitive for me. It’s lightweight, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t want the PCs thinking quite so much about whether they need to spend their screen time now, or later, and niggling over probabilities. They need to be encouraged to throw themselves foolishly into the maw of madness.
So, I wondered: Can you run Call of Cthulhu in Savage Worlds? The key, hallmark element of games based on Lovecraft’s existential horror is that the Truth is not something human minds can deal with. The world _does_ hate you, because its most powerful beings are uncaring, horrible monsters. So when the pseudopods of their plots and schemes and heartless accidents intrude on your world… you’re pretty much guaranteed to go partly or completely mad.
The basic mechanic of wounds in Savage Worlds seems perfectly extensible to this concept, which is why, of course, noone went there. The Sanity system in Weird War II was just tacked on, and Deadlands, bizzarrely, is too pulpy for it to make sense there.
Reality Blurs decided they were going to get it right, and right they got it. Realms of Cthulhu presents us with a world where Fate is Unkind (rolled snake eyes? you may not spend a benny there), and Mental Anguish is the measure of a failed Guts check. Sanity is limited by your Corruption, whether you gained said Corruption by vile acts or by reading books to gain Knowledge (Mythos). It hangs together prettily on paper.
The next thing I want to do is iron out, for my own sanity, guidelines for handling investigations in Realms. I want to use the core Trail concept of never making players roll to get important clues. I think the system in Savage Worlds might be tight enough to allow investigative skills to be important even at a d4 – narrow, but usually rolled at an effective +4 – you will get the clue, and raises will get you more color. Still thinking. Just enjoying the prettiness of the system, still.
Yeah, I know I’ve not posted anything significant since July. I’ll see if I can’t get better at that.
(crossposted from The Dream Library)
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I've been without a land line for years now. It makes me think about how kids are going to be communicating in the future - with no common landline, there's significantly less chance I'll be able to monitor their communications, know who they're talking to, without some fairly wily monitoring software. Leads to a situation where the question is: Where do you draw the line of trust? How do you teach kids that you have a valid need to know who they're communicating with without making them want to hide it from you? How do we prevent another generation of 'Stranger Danger' paranoia, isolating us all from our neighbors (who, statistically, are decent folks, but we've been taught to believe are all rapists and serial killers by media)? We have a hugely open communications venue in the Internet, and personal communications are becoming trivially available, _and_ more vital every day. Is it ethical to monitor kids' communications online, since they're minors and aren't necessarily fully cognizant of their actions' impact? Tags: writer's block
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Being someone who sits at a computer all day, both by choice and for pay, and someone who hasn’t yet replaced their hands with bionics or a mind-machine interface, I’ve been slowly moving towards the ergonomic interface accessories.
I’ve long since gotten used to the moderately bad-sci-fi appearance of the average ergonomic keyboard, mostly because they’re damn comfy. My new mouse, however, looks like something out of … damn, I can’t even think of a movie ref. Schlocky, though. It’s the Logitech Revolution MX. I needed something that wouldn’t suck batteries like my current bluetooth mouse did, and came home with a rechargeable mutant mouse.
It’s got a wing on it so my thumb doesn’t drag on the desk (ooh, luxury…?), and in the ‘wacky feature’ category, a weighted scroll wheel that notices when I’m scrolling quickly and throws a _solenoid_ so the wheel goes from ratchety to free-spin mode. What the hey.
If it weren’t for the lack of flying cars, I’d think we’re in the future.
(crossposted from The Dream Library)
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Work Update
This last couple weeks has been rough. Due to really remarkably poor planning on the part of the client and our contract writers about 18 months ago, my employer laid off six people from our contract two weeks ago, including my boss and most senior team member. Overwhelming bitterness aside (for the team member, not the boss), I’ve been buried the last couple weeks trying to make a new balance. I think we’ll be fine eventually, but there’ll be some hiccups.
Horrors Unknown
I’m going to have to blame Candace for interesting me in Lovecraftian horror so long ago. For the last few months, I’ve been collecting Robin Laws’ Gumshoe games. It started with Ken Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu - an updated Lovecraftian horror game with a very different design philosophy than the lousy BRP system Chaosium uses for their stuff, and also distinct from Candace’s fiat diceless system. Desiring more material to use to understand the system’s philosophy, I followed up by purchasing the other Gumshoe games - Mutant City Blues first, which is less horror, more police procedural + superpowers. After that, I had to go to Indie Press Revolution to get the more obscure stuff, like Esoterrorists and Fear Itself.
Having collected all of this, I’ve started losing Stability and possibly Sanity reading disturbing modern horror stories and questioning: Why do I like horror? What makes it horrible and what makes it appealing?
I don’t have any answers yet, but I’m not done asking.
Next: I need to go find R. Chambers’ King in Yellow stuff to use for game research.
Fewer Preservatives
The media’s been doing its thing - I keep reading horrible things about high fructose corn syrup - prime cause of intraabdominal fat, eevil glycemic index, so on. So I’ve taken to avoiding it when I can, in favor of real sugar, or sucralose on occasion (curse you, energy drinks). But I’ve also started seeing an interesting trend - sugary drinks with _real sugar_ are popular again. It started with Red Bull Cola - the cola you can identify every single ingredient of as being natural. Now I’m seeing Pepsi Throwback (Cane Sugar), Pepsi Natural (Identifiable ingredients), and recently, Ice cream with no weird stuff in. Haagen-Dasz 5-ingredient ice cream is tasty.
Now, the question is: will this trend stick, and what will that mean? I like reasonably natural stuff…
(crossposted from The Dream Library)
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The last month has been a bit of a whirlwind - we decided to look into a local move shortly before the end of February; I decided that I was uncomfortable with the idea of moving to a new job with the economy sending everyone running for cover like it has, and the failback was a nonoptional “get the hell out of this tiny little box” move.
It turns out that the local base housing got opened up for civilian use, including contractors like me. For about $400 more than we were paying at SunBay, we’re able to afford a place twice the size! It’s a duplex, with the other unit damaged and unlikely to see use in the near future, and it’s built to military spec, so it’s so solid a couple doors actually do stop sound.
We started moving in on the 7th or so, and the last three weeks have been a whirlwind of bureaucracy and physical labor. We finished moving out of the old place on the 22nd, and this weekend has been the first real swing at emptying the mad squad of boxes we have here.
We now have an office, about 40% less boxes in the front room, and by the end of the night, we’ll have a floor in the bedroom.
I’ve been occupied digging around in all the books we’ve freed up; getting familiar with the basics of Savage Worlds for Eloria, recollecting a bit of Changeling, and reading In Nomine again. We have a lot of books. They should keep us occupied for a good long time.
Work has gotten interesting as well. An 18 month clock has started, roughly, and we’ll have to rearchitect everything in 6 and move everyong off the old system in the 12 months following. It’s likely to be exciting times. Here’s hoping.
Becky’s sorting through all her old clothes boxes, the ones that were in storage. She keeps wandering in here in this and that - cloaks and whatnot. She’s having a lot of fun.
(crossposted from The Dream Library) Tags: life
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