stormkeeper

[stormkeeper]

I am not allowed to FIX this but I can DIAGNOSE it? What ever will I do now?

Me: A PFY (jr. sysadmin/support person) in a large university’s computer science department.

Boss: Sr. Computer Science sysadmin, my supervisor, bureaucratic genius, and all-around good guy. Hero of several previous stories I’ve posted.

PP: Physical Plant, the buildings & grounds maintenance department.

Scene: We need to run a Ethernet [network] cable from a room to an adjacent room. About 20 years ago. The doors to these rooms had a nice gap underneath (this is important).

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[stormkeeper]

It’s not fair

I’ve been playing the Witcher 3 for the last million hours and I’m loving it… I think I must be almost 8% of the way through the game by now.  

Like, it’s pretty great, but it also makes me so angry.  Look at this screenshot I took of Ciri, one of the main characters:

Sure, the graphics are great and I actually really love her character design and I’m excited to learn more about her and stuff.  But…. look at her hair!  It’s freaking great.  This wonderful messy style with all the strands flying about, reacting to things like wind and her movements.  It’s wonderful.  And I gotta ask myself - why?  Why this game?  Why is this the game to fucking master hair physics.  There’s tons of great games where you get to design your own character but the hair all looks fucking horrible.  But the developers for the Witcher cracked the code!

And this isn’t one of those cases where the main characters look great and are rendered in loving detail but everyone else looks like crap.  Even the random NPCs have great hair!

Look at that!  That’s fucking cute!  She’s just an innkeeper and she looks better than the main characters of most other triple AAA games.

They even figured out how to render long hair without it looking really weird or clipping into the clothing and stuff.  Most other games won’t let you have hair that goes past your chin, lest the plastic-y solid piece of polygons that forms your coif glitches into your pauldrons and ruins fucking everything.

And lest you think my concerns are merely shallow, they are not.  Like, yes I want my characters to be able to look pretty, but it’s also about immersion and characterization.  I mean, look how fucking dumb that peasant with his bowl cut looks!  Thanks to that level of detail, I’m now able to imagine an entire history for Bowl Cut Peasant.  

So okay, Witcher 3 has the best hair of any game I’ve ever played - which makes me fucking furious.  I mean, one playthrough of Dragon Age Inquisition takes 150 hours and I gotta look at my character the whole fucking time.  But I only have like 12 options for hairstyles and 8 of them are some variation of a fucking buzzcut.  Like, what the hell?  Even if you couldn’t make them blow majestically in the wind, I would’ve liked a few more choices.

But not only does Witcher 3 outdo every game in the hair styles and physics department - it goes a step further.  Into a level of detail that no one asked for or thought they needed.  Because Geralt’s fucking facial hair grows.

There he is after I bought a shave for him, like, yesterday.  You can already see some stubble.

And there he is with a glorious fucking beard a few days later.  Like, what the fuck.  I kinda like it, but it’s not a feature I ever would have thought to ask for.  It’s not like I was sitting there playing my games thinking “You know, this is great, but the fact that I don’t witness the hair growing is really killing the immersion for me”.  Like, way to go above and beyond for no fucking reason.

TLDR the Witcher 3 is great and I am bitter.

[stormkeeper]

YOU CAN SKIP THE DRIVING SECTIONS IN LA NOIR?!?!?!?!?! I literally stopped playing that game because of that. How?

You can choose to have your partner drive the car during cases, which basically just turns it into a fast travel system.

First, you select your destination on the map.  Then, whatever button you tap to get in the car, HOLD it down instead when you’re next to the car.  Your partner will take the wheel, and you can skip forward to the interesting parts of the game!

[stormkeeper]

Tumblr fam, can I get this off my chest?

Kitty here! Umm, I know this is a bit unorthodox, but… Y’all Tumblr bebes are super sweet about this sort of thing, so I’m posting something here and here only.

I just got a cat.

When New Cat is named and fully acclimated, she will def join the dogs, guinea pigs, and chickens as a Tumblr/Instagram regular.

But I have…mixed feelings.

My last cat died six months ago. We didn’t get another cat to replace her–c'est impossible, she was irreplaceable. Rather, we did it because we know two things:

1. A house that’s had a cat in it will always feel empty without a cat in it.

2. We have money and space and time and patience and love, and shelters are full of cats who don’t got none of those things.

Still, I’ve been thinking about my last cat Clementine a lot. And I think it would be healing to me to share a few photos of her.

This was Clementine. We adopted her when she was 14 years old. That’s old. If she were human, she would’ve been in her early seventies. Her previous owner had moved into a nursing home. She was lucky to land in one of the few no-kill shelters with enough resources to accept a cat of her age. Many don’t.

Clementine was terribly stressed out being in the shelter after so many years in one person’s home. Her fur started to fall out, and she refused to eat. She hid all the time and hissed if approached. No one applied for her.

We saw a lot of great cats at the shelter. For some reason, she was the one my partner and I both couldn’t stop thinking about. We talked about it, and decided we had the patience, emotional maturity, and financial stability needed to address the realities of adopting a shy geriatric cat. So we took her home, and released her under the bed.

“We might never see this cat,” I told my partner. “We might just know she’s here by periodic dips in the level of the food bowl.”

“I’d be okay with that,” he said.

“I would too.”

We didn’t see her for 36 hours.

Then, I heard a little sound while I was sitting in bed–not a meow, but a chirp. I looked down, and she sitting there, looking up at me. She chirped again. I patted the blanket. She sprang up beside me and started purring. Surprised, I took this blurry, crappy photo.

Within a week, she was climbing into our laps and kneading us with rapturous abandon. Sometimes she would start to drool out of pure joy.

Now, one complication was our dog. Clementine had never met a dog before, and I’d intended to introduce them very slowly and carefully. When she caught her first glimpse of our dog Brother, I was focused wholly on him, making sure he didn’t lunge or startle her. She darted past me, and ran to rub her face against him.

She was sleeping on top him by the end of the week.

To our complete surprise, Clementine was not scared of dogs.

Clementine loved dogs.

All dogs. Any dogs.

We foster dogs, and every new one that came home got the same treatment. She ran to them like an old lover, chirping her barely-audible chirps, paws warming up to give them a deep tissue massage the moment they sat down.

She put in an application to adopt Sunny, a red heeler mix who was our our 13th or 14th foster. We accepted her application and made him our second dog.

In the course of her four-year career, she cat-trained over a dozen dogs, making each of them infinitely more adoptable. Many went on to permanent homes with cats.

I was always hovering around her and the dogs, incredibly nervous that one might injure her. She’d been declawed by her first owner; she was defenseless. 

But she knew exactly how to handle each one. She sat calmly and accepted sloppy licks from overly-affectionate dogs. She hid from excitable, high-energy dogs until after their playtime. We had one that was so afraid of cats that she was borderline aggressive towards them, but Clementine was absolutely determined. That dog was sleeping peacefully next to her after a month of relentless displays of patient friendliness.

Clem was the Nurse Joy of the house. She always knew if someone was hurting, emotionally or physically.

In this photo, our older dog Brother was suddenly deathly sick. Underneath the blanket he’s swaddled in more blankets and many layers of towels, because he was uncontrollably oozing blood. When we brought him home from the emergency vet, Clementine immediately crouched on top of his head, purring and kneading so intensely that it felt like she was in some kind of trance. He recovered fully.

When a (human) friend of ours was recovering from a horrible trauma, Clementine parked herself on her chest and refused to budge.

“But… But… I don’t like cats…” our friend said, a last feeble protest before submitting to Clementine’s healing ministrations.

We had four glorious years with Clementine. She made it to 18–a great age for a cat. She died peacefully, without pain, and is buried on our property, underneath a her favorite catnip plant.

I don’t know what her life was like before we met, but I know she was happy in those four years. She showed it to us every single day.

I’m so glad we took a chance on a shy senior. There were a lot of risks and a lot of unknowns. We were so focused on accepting those that we weren’t prepared for what we got: the best outcome of all possible outcomes.

That’s all I wanted to say, really! Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.

New Cat is 14, the same age Clementine was when we adopted her. She’s in the early stages of renal disease, but we’re hoping she has a few good years left. I’m excited to get to know New Cat. I’m looking forward to posting pictures of her as she finds her place in our house.

I wrote an article soon after she died about why I think senior pets are totally worth it. You can read it here:

http://www.bitchesgetriches.com/twelve-reasons-senior-pets-are-an-awesome-investment/

[stormkeeper]

One of my newest gaming related purchases... I got an amazing deal on it too, though I had to travel pretty far from home to get it! It has 240 16-bit games that would be great even at the quoted price, but I got it for far cheaper than that... Not sure if it's as cheap now though! #retrogaming #classicgaming #miniarcademachine #gaming #tinygaming #miniarcade #coolthings #stormkeeperatgeekedup #gamedupuk (at London, United Kingdom)

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My latest #bigbox #pc #games acquired over the past couple of weeks! #pcgames #pcgaming #bigboxpcgames #classicgaming #oldpcgames (at London, United Kingdom)

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Out with the #commodore 64! #retrogaming #c64 #commodore64 #8bit #classicgames #classicgaming #8bitgaming #8bitcomputing (at London, United Kingdom)

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A small sample of my old WorldScape mIRC Script from over 10-15+ years ago, which is going to get some sort of update over the coming weeks! (at London, United Kingdom)

[stormkeeper]

Very sad news today - legendary composer of DOOM and other great games, Bobby Prince, has been diagnosed with colon cancer. Please consider helping him out by donating. This man has given us some of the most iconic tracks in video game history and he deserves all the help we can give him.

[stormkeeper]

Finally got a Raspberry Pi 3, which I'm in the process of giving a firmware update; it needs a case as well, and as of yet I've no idea what I want to do with this one, but at the same time, I can at least play around with it to see what it can do! #raspberrypi #singleboardcomputer #linux #raspbian (at London, United Kingdom)

[stormkeeper]

Wonder if I could still use this with a newer version of the software... Although at this point, it's not even a Borland product any more! (at London, United Kingdom)

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The latest addition to my big box PC game collection! (at Thamesmead)

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Lovely view from the top deck! (at Aldwych)

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So, according to CEX Woolwich, this is how much an unboxed copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64 goes for... That's quite a bit of cash! I actually have a boxed copy of the game, although the box has seen better days. (at Powis Street Woolwich)

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Not the most perfect of stacking jobs, but I think that I did a good job of making microwave fudge for the first time, although I'll be doing the same method a little less haphazardly in the future!

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The inside of a PC that I rescued from a recycling area, though I've now disassembled it to use some of the parts elsewhere! (at Thamesmead)

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As far as things go, this is a pretty good result for my (relatively small) investments and free credit!), especially since Bitcoin is so volatile... I was hoping that Zynga was performing a bit better than what it is though! ~65 USD profit isn't to be sniffed at either, all things considered... (at Thamesmead)