How good is your perception of colour? Can you easily discriminate between and order hues? Test yourself here - http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77.
The lower your score, the better, with 0 being a perfect eye for hues and shades, and around 1000 being the default (unordered) score. My best score was 12, with a few errors in the purple-blue spectrum.
After Dorrie’s death, I was cat-less for around two weeks before I couldn’t stand the silence in the house any longer. I took myself down to the Cat Shelter to find a suitable cat. They don’t reserve cats that won’t be ready till after their vaccinations, which is why I spent three hours on Easter Sunday waiting outside the Shelter to be first in the queue for a little 1 year old brindle tortie I’d fallen in love with the week before, Treacle. She’d been really loving when I first met her, so I adopted her and took her home, telling myself that I shouldn’t expect her to be another Dorrie. Indeed, she wasn’t. For the first week, she meowed almost non-stop. The only times she stopped were when she was eating, and when she was walking over my lap, treadling her paws (and claws!) into my thighs to get comfortable. When I shut her downstairs overnight, she cried for hours, stopped for a while in the middle of the night, then started crying again around 4am. When I let her upstairs to sleep on my bed instead, she curled up into a ball and fell asleep. Success! But no - she woke me up at 3.30am for three nights running, without fail, by walking over my head. I shut her downstairs again and hoped she would lose her voice, with all the meowing.
I read up on lone cats. The general consensus on the internet seemed to be ‘get another cat’. I really didn’t want to be a two-cat household (more animals than humans is not a goer for me), but at the same time it seemed unfair to take her back to the Shelter. So, the next Saturday, I went down to the Shelter for advice. They suggested that I could either get a second cat, or wait a little while longer to see if she settled in. The cats they had that they thought would be suitable weren’t ready anyway, so I at least had a grace period. I left the Shelter and went down to the pet shop to get some more toys for Treacle and, back at home, ordered a cat tree for her. Amazingly, it seemed to work somewhat. She played with the toys, explored the cat tree disdainfully at first, and didn’t cry quite so much. Several more nights of shutting her downstairs seemed to reinforce the idea that crying would not get her middle-of-the-night sympathy. I told the Shelter that she seemed to be settling down, and relaxed a bit.
She still spends an inordinate amount of time sleeping next to me or treadling my thighs if I’m on the sofa. Occasionally she’ll hare around the living room like a mad thing, or try to claw up the rug. Whilst I’m a bit too nervous to let her go outside after what happened to Dorrie, she does look out the window and cry now and then. I got her a leash and harness and might try going out into the back garden with her. She escaped last night when I opened the living room door and I spent 10 worried minutes in the rain trying to coax her out from under the neighbours’ cars. I introduced her to the spare bedroom for the first time today, and she meowed for 20 minutes straight, even when I shooed her out and back downstairs. Won’t be trying that one again.
It has to be said that Treacle is an amazingly loving cat. She loves attention and never turns down some fuss, unlike Dorrie, who would only tolerate so much stroking before nipping. Her favourite sleeping spot is next to me (cute, but not always a good thing). She’s relaxed around my friends, and will happily go to them for fuss. She thinks she’s a guard dog, and will growl if someone knocks on the door. She uses the litter tray, and has done from day one, and doesn’t claw the litter liner to pieces. She’s definitely got a very different personality to Dorrie, which is understandable. It’s taking me time to adjust to her, and probably her to me, but I like to think we’re making progress. Here’s hoping we find happy common ground. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma
More game-alicious fun over the weekend at Furnace, the Sheffield based roleplaying convention. In its second year, attendance was up from approx 40 in 2006 to just under 70 this year. Even with increased number, it was a fantastic weekend. I got to meet up with people I haven’t seen in up to a year, made some new friends, and represented the RP community’s female minority fabulously, if I do say so myself.
I played in several games over the weekend. Keary and Rik (a close friend of many years) were there representing the Kult of Keepers, and I took part in Keary’s Call of Cthulhu game on the Saturday morning. As in any good Cthulhu game, we ended up mad and indentured for eternity. The game overran a bit, so by the time I’d gotten myself something to eat, I was too late to sign up for an afternoon game. Instead, I spent the time writing up an adventure to run on the Sunday.
Saturday evening saw me in Dom’s Savage World’s 2300AD game, on a bug hunt in deep space. Station Arcturus had been taken over by aliens, so it was down to the US Marine Corps and French/Australian liaisons to get it back! Cue bad accents, blazing guns, and none too subtle references to Aliens. Lots of fun.
Saturday night I ended up lending my spare bedroom and living room to Steff and Keary, who needed somewhere to sleep for the night. Good guys, both of ‘em.
Sunday morning I was a bit nervous - after a couple of months of GMing on Thursday nights down at the Old Queen’s Head, I decided to try running a game of Scion: Hero. It’s one of the newer White Wolf releases, and I’d never run it before, save for a quick intro last Thursday night. I didn’t think I was going to get enough players to run it at first, but after a last minute round up, I got 5 people round the table - Tim, Matt, Graham, Ric and Russell - and ran a game heavily lifted from the book. Happily, it went very well indeed, and I’ll be running some more Scion from now on at the Thursday night sessions. Of course, as Graham told me, that means I’m now obliged to run more at Furnace 2008. At least I have a year’s practice ahead of me!
Sunday afternoon was Graham’s Fading Suns game - sci-fi and sneakiness as we tried to hunt down a jump key without the many other quick fingered villains getting their hands on it first. Might have helped if we’d been a bit more discreet about who we were talking to!
Great atmosphere all weekend - couldn’t have asked for a better time.
I was up at a horrendously early hour yesterday, in order to meet up with Graham, one of the Thursday night roleplayers. Tom and Matt were picking us up from Meadowhall to drive down to Milton Keynes for a small roleplaying conference called Concrete Cow. [If you know nothing about roleplaying, or think it’s sad or boring, you might want to skip down to the very end, because I’m about to unleash my inner geek and most of it will probably be indecipherable to a non-roleplayer!]
I was really excited about going down there, because there were several games on I was hoping to play in. The Call of Cthulhu team, Kult of Keepers, of which my friend Rik is a member, would be there to run some games. In addition, there would be two writers for White Wolf (Stew Wilson and Wood Ingham) running Werewolf and Vampire games respectively. As game signups were on the day, I was keeping my fingers crossed that I’d get there before the game slots were fully booked. Despite Tom’s satnav initially leading us astray by several miles, we made it to Wolveton just before the official start of 10am. I made a beeline for the signup table, and to my delight managed to get a place in all three of the games I wanted to play in – Cthulhu in the morning slot, Werewolf in the afternoon, and Vampire in the evening.
The Cthulhu game was run by Paul Fricker, and was loosely based on Reservoir Dogs, although of course with a creeping horror twist. When we were handed the pre-generated character sheets and info on our characters, the first thing that jumped out at me was ‘You are an undercover cop’. That’s me dead, I told myself. Amazingly, no-one in the party figured out I was a cop. Instead, the poor guy who had been shot in the arm by a pursing police officer at the start of the adventure was strongly suspected of being the plant. I survived the game, if you can call dwelling as a torn soul for all eternity in Carcosa surviving. Honestly, that’s got to be some kind of win in Cthulhu, given the normal win is a descent into irreversible gibbering insanity!
Stew’s Werewolf game was my first experience of White Wolf’s World of Darkness since they’d reworked the whole game world after the Time of Gehenna stuff. I have to admit that the new system is very smooth – a lot more so than the old system could often be, which of course is the idea. I’d originally turned my nose up at what I’d thought was a cop-out reset, but I’ve definitely since revised my opinion. We played an adventure in which we were pitted against cultists and their ‘dirty work’ arsonists who wanted to raise the spirit of the Great Fire of London. Stew had pre-generated starter characters, but we either got really lucky, or he needs to revise the stats, because come the end game we completely ploughed through the bad guys, and then took down the great spirit in 2 rounds. Some great moments in the game, with my personal favourites being the roll that enabled me to catch and immediately defuse a Molotov cocktail as it was thrown through a window, and the rule of re-rolling 10s that, in a hideously lucky rolling of the dice, got me a 33 on initiative when the average is more like 10. Cue dropped jaws from the other players.
Wood’s Vampire game was actually a playtest. He’s writing for a new supplement called Requiem for Rome, based (unsurprisingly) in the time of the Roman Empire. He’s a very energetic storyteller, and it’s obvious he’s done a load of research in prep for the book. The game was set at the time of Constantine’s defeat of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312AD, and dealt with the aftermath and a supernatural twist. There are some new introductions in the supplement that I think the Vampire fans are going to like a lot, with a new sub-system, a new clan, and, I’m fairly sure, a lot of history on the Roman Empire, including lifestyle and beliefs and culture.
All but one of the players of the Vampire game had also played in the Werewolf game – a good group of guys. As playtesters, we’ll be credited when the adventure is published, although I don’t know whether that’ll be in the Requiem for Rome book or in the adventure as a standalone download from White Wolf.
I got chatting briefly to Wood after the game – he said he lived down in Swansea, and I mentioned I’d lived in South Wales for a time – Cardiff and Pontypridd. One of the players from the Vampire game, Alex, said, “University of Glamorgan?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I replied, a little surprised.
“I thought I recognised you,” he said. “I was there when you were.”
I was flabbergasted. I’d thought during the game that he vaguely reminded me of someone, but I was thinking of a guy I’d known in Cardiff, not someone who’d gone to Glamorgan.
“Yeah,” Alex went on to say, “I remember a short lived Vampire game.”
Well, colour me amazed. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t remember him, so I don’t know if we had much interaction, but it’s one hell of a small world.
The sessions ended around 10.45pm, and Tom, Matt, Graham and I left by 11pm to drive back to Sheffield. Tom dropped me off at around 1am, and I flaked pretty soon after that.
If the forthcoming Furnace roleplaying conference up here in Sheffield goes as well, it’ll be a fantastic weekend.
Travelling the same tram route at the same time every Monday-Friday, you get to know many faces. There’s the conductors, of course, several of whom recognise me well enough to comment if they see me on the tram late at night, when I ’should be at home’! There’s the people who work at HSBC, lots of them with their name tags clipped to their waistbands - the short, dark haired one who reminds me of a primary school teacher I had, the younger girl with her hair always tied back impeccably, the tall, thin and freckled girl, the lad who looks five years too young for a suit and tie, and so on. I don’t know any of their names, and they don’t know mine, but we take the same journey every day, and have done for years.
I rarely get an insight into their personality. They’ll often chatter amongst themselves, but not about anything of significance. They could be married, single, with kids or without, still living at home, interested in football or tennis, secret alcoholics, party animals, dog lovers… you never know. Just occasionally, though, once in a while, I’ll pick something up. Sarah’s wedding is next weekend, Tom and Cath’s baby is a boy, Deb’s lost 10lbs on her diet. Little day to day things. And sometimes, very, very rarely, I see or hear something that really stands out.
Last night, one of the HSBC women took a seat next to me. She doesn’t tend to chat with the main group. Perhaps she doesn’t work in the same department as them. She’s always impeccably dressed, and wears the kind of high heels that would have me crippled within ten steps of the front door. She favours skirts rather than trousers, and her hair is never out of place. She also comes across as rather serious; straight faced, perhaps even a little aloof.
As we passed out of the city centre, her mobile phone bleeped. Incoming text message. The screen lit up as she opened the message, and out of the corner of my eye I saw, ‘I want to peel your clothes off‘. I immediately looked out of the window, fascinated by something, anything else. I managed to keep my eyes away until she’d stopped reading the message - only to find when I looked back that she’d started typing one of her own in reply, ‘You’re really getting me going‘. Oh yeah. Fascinating thing outside again. I wish I could have seen her face, but given she was sitting next to me, I couldn’t tell. I watched her carefully as she got off the tram. She has a fantastic poker face, but I bet she couldn’t wait to get home.
Enough of the posts about rodents. Much more going on recently.
A couple of weeks ago, disillusioned by my PC laptop (which I have to admit had never been the same after it contracted a virus, even though I cleaned it off), I took advantage of an offer to buy myself a MacBook. I’d always kind of shunned Macs, for no real reason other than that I was coloured by preconceptions about incompatibility and memories of my Grandad’s boxy looking monochrome Mac from years ago. Having seen the new Macs in the Apple store recently though, I was sorely tempted.
I got the MacBook just over a week ago, and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. I never would have thought I’d say this about a Mac, but I really, really like it. It’s good looking, glossy and white. The keyboard is perfectly sized, which was one of the complaints I had with the PC laptop; it was too small for me, and my typing speed suffered as a result. No such flaw with the Mac – excellent.
I’ve installed everything I needed so far – Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype – with no problems at all. In fact, installation is a piece of cake. I like it a lot. I don’t have MS Office on the laptop, but what I have installed on the advice of a friend who uses Macs is Neo Office. It does all the things Excel, Word and Powerpoint do, which makes me very happy indeed.
The battery life is excellent compared to my PC laptop – around twice the amount of time between recharging.
The best thing so far I’ve found is the internet connection. Using my wireless broadband in the house (which it detected immediately), I got download speeds around 10 times faster than I ever did on the PC laptop. I could have drooled all over the keyboard if it wouldn’t have ruined the gloss and pristineness.
Start up time is much faster than the PC. I can also open applications immediately on startup, instead of waiting for the AV software and MSN and many other things to crank into gear as I do with the PC.
I wouldn’t say I’m a total Mac convert now – but after a week of getting used to it, I’m not going to shun Macs. The big question, of course, is whether my next desktop computer will be a Mac when the PC gives out…
Another year older! Thirty-two years ago, at around 8.20pm, I was born in a hospital in the midlands of England, first-born child of Julia and Brian, and first-born granddaughter to my maternal grandparents, Bill and Helen.
Browsing through Friends Reunited and LiveJournal earlier; of 10 friends I knew when I lived down in Cardiff whose profiles I’ve found:
Seven are married, one is getting married soon.
Five have a child, one is pregnant.
Three are living abroad.
Thinking back to then seems a world away - Tuesday nights down the Tavistock, shared houses and bad landlords, live gaming in the upstairs room at the 147 Club or down at that place by the bus station (I’ve forgotten its name!), cycling to work down Queen Street at 6.45 in the morning when it was deserted…
Time since I…
…left secondary school - 14 years, 2 months.
…left University - 10 years, 3 months.
…moved to Sheffield - 7 years, 4 months .
…bought my house - 5 years, 5 months.
…started my current job - 4 years, 11 months.
…acquired a cat - 11 months.
It’s amazing how it seems to pass so quickly.
[Because it’ll get it out of the way.]
When book 6 came out, my brother and I went to Meadowhall to be at Waterstones when it opened at midnight. I’m not a rabid, undying fan of the books, but I do like them, as does my brother Chris, so there we were. It was late, I was mildly crotchety, and by the time we got back home I didn’t want to stay up and read for any more than half an hour.
The hype about the seventh book has been unbelievable. Movies get hyped beyond belief, but never books. Saying that, though, I can’t think of any other multi-part epics spanning 7 fictional years (10 in reality) in recent times. For my part, I actually read the book several days ago through a not so legitimate route, avoiding the crowds in town. Yes, I liked it. Yes, I’ll probably get a hard copy of the book eventually, but not for now.
I was saved from having to drag myself into town and hang around in the rain for ages in the middle of the night. I sensibly went to bed instead to get a good night’s sleep, but I woke up at 2am, dreaming about the damn book. Perhaps it was the projected unbridled joy of thousands of kids clutching copies of the book in their hot and eager little hands. Ugh. I tossed and turned for ages, getting out of bed at one point to shut the cat downstairs because she wasn’t helping, but still couldn’t get back to sleep. I just felt hot and itchy and uncomfortable. That’s how I ended up having a shower at 3.20am in an attempt to settle down. By the time I’d dried my hair (feeling slightly guilty in case the sound of the hairdryer at 4am woke my neighbour) I was finally able to get some sleep.
Out at Meadowhall today, there were still piles of the book in Waterstones and WHSmiths. Interrupted sleep or not, I’m glad I wasn’t there at midnight.
