freckles_and_doubt | Recent Entries

Last night, having after several weeks of play flogged my way through the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard (the new Bioware game), I arrived at the climactic battle in my characteristic gameplay state: having duly and grimly maxed out all my companions' levels, completed all their individual angst-ridden storylines, refined my and their equipment to the highest quality, secured my romance of choice, massaged my allies to the greatest possible functionality, scoured every local map for quest markers, and knocked off every quest listing in my journal. Then I clicked on the fateful doorway to enter the final confrontation, and the game crashed to desktop. At which point I thought "Thank fuck!" and went to bed in a state of relief that the cosmic wossnames were, for once, looking out for me and, probably, my blood pressure.

What I am saying is, having finished the damned thing this morning in a state of fulminating irritation, I am now going to launch into a full-fledged rant on how much this game annoyed me from the vantage point of someone who both dropped a bucketload of money to upgrade my computer to run it, and has damned well played it to the hilt, if only more or less out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

I am a Bioware fangirl. I have played all the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games multiple times, some of them over and over and over again (probably nearly twenty run-throughs of Inquisition). I love their worldbuilding, their ethos of character interaction, their ability to present difficult choices and actual consequences, their humour and pathos and even their gosh-darned political sweep, this last being something I usually hate in my fluffy down-time pursuits. The last few weeks have consequently been marked by rising anger, betrayal and grief as I realised, incrementally, just how far the makers of Veilguard have departed from the previous games in the series: not just in the sense of ignoring or contradicting huge swathes of backstory and event and history and build-up, but in their clearly shifted goalposts, their determination to make, at base, simply a different kind of game.

How different? let me count the ways in which it has repeatedly made me swear, rage, cry or succumb to ennui.

I get that setting it in Tevinter is necessarily a shift to an area we haven't seen before other than by implication, but Veilguard simply abandons or ignores too much history from the previous games. The mage rebellion has dropped off the map entirely, which, fair, Tevinter didn't experience it, but given the carry-through of the Inquisitor and Varric and Harding, too many previous decisions and characters are simply not referenced. Hawke and the possible stuck-in-the-Fade outcome? The Hero of Ferelden's search for a blight cure? various romances - Solas/Inquisitor (particularly!), Dorian/Bull? I know that that's a lot of possible ramifications given different player choices in different games, but they managed the world-state specifications and brief acknowledgements in DAI, why can't they here? What about Tevinter and slavery and Fenris's whole crusade? we don't even see slaves. And blight contact used to be a death sentence, see: whole basis for the DAO warden thing, and now it's not an issue? Despite relying on player investment in previous games as a marketing tool, they have surgically detatched Veilguard from a lot of what's gone before, and it feels like a severed limb.
Veilguard gameplay presents a huge loss of what I can only call interactive texture, a sort of cut-price flattening of environments and radical slimming of NPC interactions. Compared to Skyhold, the Lighthouse feels bland and rather cold; there is a lack of connection to supporting allies who are dispersed to different allied bases rather than existing in a community. It feels like a related problem that quests are often tickboxes, in which motivations are often insubstantial and outcomes perfunctory. High-stakes choices feel unearned, decisions made for companions are unscaffolded and based on insufficient information. Too often it feels as though the game is paying lip service to agency. Losing or blighting a companion based on an arbitrary choice is maddening, I strenuously object to being blindsided by losses I have no way of predicting or avoiding. I play games to feel instrumental, not helpless.
The overall feel of the game tends to a deliberate darkness and nastiness, environments and events have a relentless emphasis on grimness and destruction - not just metaphorically, actually, too often the visuals are too damned dark to see properly. The blight in particular is disgusting and depressing. If I wanted to wade through squelching tentacles and pulsating boils I'd play a horror game.
The escalation of stakes was ridiculous - not just another Blight, but gods? TWO gods? Multiple blighted dragons? multiple Archdemons? they trashed the world. It was all so over-the-top I couldn't really get invested in the actually interesting reveals in lore and history and what have you.
I realise these have never been open-world games, but previous iterations did not lead one around by the nose quite as egregiously. Inquisition managed a wonderfully open-world feel, the rollback on that is heartbreaking. Too much of Veilguard felt like blindly following the little diamonds towards the next quest objective, through often confusing landscapes that were painted backdrops rather than a real world.
if I wanted to play timed or dexterity challenges (which I do not at all in any way) I would play a fucking console game. If I wanted to repeatedly solve stupid blight-node puzzles I would play stupid puzzle games. The puzzles are not intelligent and are often not properly scaffolded. I have never resorted to walkthroughs so often in my life, mostly because I simply didn't care enough to work it out for myself.
If I wanted to micromanage tactical combos I would fucking look for that kind of game. Skill improvement felt arbitrary and opaque, trees were too complicated and new bonuses felt meaningless, combos were too fiddly to bother with, I ended up leaving companions to do their own thing. Playing on the lowest difficulty meant that button-mashing was actually fine as a strategy, but I do not like feeling that significant development time went into combat refinements I don't care about, at the cost of character and narrative interactions I do actually care about.
I do actually want to micromanage equipment bonuses, I do not want to acquire random arbitrary gear with constellated bonuses I cannot optimise for myself. Nor to I wish to accumulate huge quantities of gear I cannot sell, or remove from my inventory, or give to my companions. Or even look through easily, they could have given us a damned sort function so I wasn't wading through irrelevant armour types every time I picked up something new and tried to work out if it was worth swapping.
I actually loved the companion personalities and stories, but too often your own choice of response wasn't actually meaningful - in fact, a lot of the time I felt that choices on the conversation wheel were making no damned difference to anything. I can only speak personally to the Lucanis romance, which was deeply unsatisfying because it basically dropped off the map as soon as you'd made the conversation choice which was explicitly supposed to trigger it. It felt tick-box and unsubstantial, with too huge a gap between "you're in a romance!" and any actual narrative payoff. There was no supporting background detail, banter, romance interactions; hell, Fallout 4 did a better job of making a romance feel organic and scaffolded, and that's an FPS.
Overall the writing actually wasn't brilliant, interactions often felt immature. Egregious example: Taash's nonbinary story was great, except it wholesalely dumped the idiom and structure of contemporary gender identity - in fact, of an extremely recent, narrow and specific idea of gender identity - on top of a fantasy setting, and made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to integrate it into any of the Thedas cultures, either linguistically or conceptually. I loved that they included it so respectfully, but the implementation in a weird way felt particularly young - it needed a more objective perspective and more nuanced consideration of the cultural implications in the Thedas setting.

This game gave me the same feeling that recent Marvel superhero films have done: that I have just bought into a marketing exercise whose point is to maximise sales to the broadest possible demographic, one which is defined, in sharp contradistinction to previous efforts in the genre, as being significantly composed of people who do not share my tastes or interests. This has resulted, primarily, in a glossy, high-production-value product focused on action and combat, onto which gestures at narrative, world-building, fidelity to previous products, and any other loci of consumer investment, have been pasted as superficially as possible. If we're talking gods, this is not the thing itself, this is a meat-puppet avatar waved on the end of a tentacle, an extrusion prettily shaped, but glassy-eyed and vacant. When I play Dragon Age, I want to play Dragon Age, goddammit, not this ersatz, lobotomised thing.

When the first US election results started coming through on Wednesday and the trend became apparent, I shut down my browser and retreated into re-reading my Sookie Stackhouse collection, on the grounds that I felt sick and have absolutely no emotional bandwidth and I didn't want to know. This didn't stop me feeling sick all day, and today I am still nauseous and miserable and despairing. They fucking did it. Despite his whole being and actions demonstrating in eye-watering technicolour exactly what he is, they re-elected that sweaty, corrupt, senile, imbecile, rapist, fascist dickhead, and the next four years, at least, probably longer, are going to be unmitigated hell. Trump's first term and his entire election campaign are basically a giant cautionary tale screaming "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" in letters of fire, and what did they do? created it. Again. Deliberately. Fuckers.

Except. While I am grief-stricken and angry and despairing and alienated in exactly the same way I was in 2016, a central reality is now much clearer. I cannot, really, blame the American people for this. Quite apart from being perfectly aware that more than half of Americans are as aghast as I am, and voted against that excrescence very hard with both hands, two other important things are evident.

One: the vast majority of people who voted for him, or who chose not to vote as an ill-thought-out "protest", did so because they have been systematically lied to by a right-wing media and/or right-wing social media misinformation exploiting their poor media literacy and inability to think critically. Both of these are themselves the product of several decades of systematic and politically-motivated undermining of the American education system. The right wing has been all too quick to realise that they will never stay in power if everyone has valid information about the candidates, parties or policies, so a horrible majority of people voting do so based on their steady diet of misinformation, marketing spin, distraction, uglification and outright lies. Billionaire-owned media conglomerates drove the election juggernaut in whatever direction they pleased, and since "right-wing billionaire" is a redundancy, liberal values being fundamentally incompatible with making obscene money by whatever means necessary, that direction was firmly in the direction of "corrupt self-serving oligarchy". Which may also be a redundancy. The Harris campaign was, as far as I can see, brilliantly run, they did everything right, and Harris was a stunningly valid candidate; Trump flailed around doing everything wrong and visibly continuing to be the Torment Nexus, and it didn't matter, because the significant people-reaching chunk of the right-wing media reported whatever the hell they wanted to report. It was sickening, and screamingly frustrating, to watch it happen.

And two: this election was stolen. Even if no-one uncovers widespread ballot-tampering, which Jesus fuck I hope someone does, this was not a free or fair election. Quite apart from the manifest insanities of the electoral college system, the American electoral landscape in the last decade or two has been characterised by widespread voter suppression, gerrymandering, ballot station inequalities and other fuckwittery designed to suppress the vote of the kind of people most likely to vote left. The whole American electoral system is an edifice of corruption and bias, which the right wing has been warping to their own ends for longer than I care to think about. It's probably marginally more fair than an African dictatorship, but it's much less honest about it.

The worst thing about re-creating the torment nexus is that its giant, destructive tornado is self-sustaining. With Trump in office for another term, both of the above will get worse, making it increasingly unlikely that a left-leaning candidate will ever be elected again. There will never be a free and fair American election without electoral reform and, failing the systematic firing squad execution of significant tracts of billionaire, massive innovations in media truth-telling requirements. The second Trump term is going to do exactly the opposite at mach fuck speeds and with gleeful, vengeful spite. Hell, if Trump manages to enact half of his misbegotten plans for the country, African dictatorships nothing, the US will actually be a dictatorship in short order. A fascist one.

And while really American politics are not my business, really they are: the US affects all of us, its media and culture and politics have global impact even above its economic and military power. What Project 2025 means for human rights is terrifing; every person, queer or trans or non-white or female, who suffers as a result of this fuckwittery, affects me because it is vindictive, unnecessary pain applied to the commonality of being human. Possibly even more importantly, given we all need basic food and water and air before we can even apply human rights, we're at a tipping point in gobal warming trends, and the next few years could be vital for reducing emissions. The Trump administration is planning to, oh, I dunno, grab one of the vile list at random: shut down the agencies monitoring climate change so they'll shut up about it and allow big business to get on with raping the environment without disturbing their profits. A second Trump term could, quite literally, destroy the world, if they go about it with any efficiency - our only hope is (a) resistance from the rest of the country and the time it will take to dismantle the safeguards the Biden administration has put into place, and (b) the fact that ultimately the far right can't find their own noisome flabby self-centred butts with both hands.

I don't do anger: I'm bad at it, I default to self-blame way before I will ever direct rage at even a worthy object. With this election outcome I am surprised to find that I am despairing, but I am also fucking incandescent with rage. We should be better that this. We are, as a race, better than this. The re-invention of the torment nexus is being driven by a tiny, disproportionately overpowered group of self-interested self-satisfied sociopaths, and I have never in my life wished so fervently for the death of specific human beings. I hope they all die in a fire. If they have their way they might, as the world burns.

I had a lovely clean-up a month or two back, I called a junk-removal firm and they came and hauled away a bunch of random detritus, old LARP props and bits of wood left over from bookshelf construction and the Rowing Machine of Unused Reproach which has sat in the shed forever. And a whole stack of gardening stuff, old pots full of soil and leaves and spiders (it's weirdly difficult to get rid of played-out soil when you don't actually have any ground on your entirely paved property) and the slowly-disintegrating empty wooden planter and what have you. It was all very satisfying, and the back courtyard looks lovely and much, much neater.

Until Spring started happening, over the last few weeks, and I thought, hang on, why aren't my flame lilies sprouting? And I checked the pot I thought they were in, and it was just soil, no tubers. I have been growing those flame lilies with great success for six or seven years now, the pot should have been chock-full of roots. So much so that in fact I transplanted them into a bigger pot at the end of last season, and I realised, with growing horror, that I must have mixed up the pots when the junk guy was here, and kept the old empty one, and thrown out the new one full of flame lily tubers.

I cannot lie, readers, I lost it. Emotional regulation not so much at the moment, and I loved those flame lilies with the deep and complicated love of a girl for her over-coded floral symbol. I raged a bit, and cried, and alarmed my mother rather a lot (she has just been in CT for three weeks, it was lovely, although I am still too tired to have done much with her, it was a very quiet three weeks pottering around mostly at home). And when I'd calmed down and regained a sense of proportion and hied me, as is inevitable, to the internet, a search was unavailing: none of the local garden places appear to have tubers in stock at the moment, the market is signally un-aflame. I had sadly resigned myself to a non-flaming spring.

Until I was pottering around watering things the other day, and realised that the pot I'd checked, and which had been signally lacking tubers, was gently sprouting the characteristic flame lily sprouts in about three different places. Out of, mark you, apparently barren soil.

I am, naturally, calloo-ing and callaying all over the show, I have not, in fact, screwed up stupidly! or if I have, it's non-fatally. But I am also deeply confused. My current top three theories:

I didn't mix up the pots, this is the original one and I hallucinated transplanting them. (Actually not impossible, my memory at the moment is the exact opposite of reliable, or reliable only in the sense of being reliably useless). This does not, however, explain why in my initial check sifting through the top half of the pot for tubers revealed absolutely no tubers, they are unlikely to have sunk gently to the bottom like whalefall.
I did mix up the pots, this is the original one and I threw out the one with all the transplanted tubers; however, the flame lilies madly self-seeded last season before I transplanted them, and are now growing happily from seed. This is unlikely only because flame lilies are apparently very difficult to grow from seed.
I did mix up the pots, this is the original one and I threw out the one with all the transplanted tubers; however, I half-assed the transplant process and only got the top half of the tubers, not realising there were more down the bottom of the pot. This is vaguely likely, particularly since the new shoots are a bit later in the season than usual, I suspect they may have had to trek up from the depths like Orpheus from the underworld.

I am going, in the absence of further conclusive evidence, with (3) as the probable sequence of events. Gratefully, and with relief. A spring without flame lilies was going to be weirdly desolate.

There is an, on the whole, surprisingly small surge of posts on Tumblr about Neil Gaiman, who has been accused of less than savoury sexual activities with much younger women in positions of comparatively less power than he has. The initial article focused on one victim has brought half a dozen others out of the woodwork, so it's a pattern. There's what seems to be a fairly balanced reflection on the situation at https://politicsdancingxyz.substack.com/p/manufacturing-consent.

This has come completely out of left field: of all the potential items on my 2024 Bingo card "Neil Gaiman sex scandal" would absolutely never have been an option. I love his writing and his social media presence - Tumblr particularly, where he is sane, enlightened, snarky, and surprisingly in tune with Tumblr's propensity for idiosyncratic off-the-wall playfulness. He seemed, on all fronts, like one of the good ones, and a part of me was desperately hoping his accusers would be revealed as chancers, drama-seekers or severely disturbed, and the whole thing manufactured in bad faith. But his response has been to make noises that "it was consensual" in various articles, and then to disappear from sight since the whole thing blew up and hire marketing firms, so that's obviously wishful thinking on my part, and I am sternly suppressing it. It seems fairly clear that he was awful to women across the span of his life, and he clearly caused horrible pain and degredation to his victims, and they have my absolute sympathy, support and admiration for their strength in coming forward with this in the teeth of his reputation and status. But the fact that their pain is clearly the important thing here doesn't actually stop me - stop many of us - from feeling our own pain and loss at a destroyed relationship with a writer and creator who felt like one of our own.

I think, on the whole, the comparative silence on Tumblr is an echo of what I'm feeling myself - shock and grief, to an extent which makes it hard to process. He has been an icon in the sf/fantasy community for as long as I've been reading sf and fantasy. His work is warm and human and compelling, his treatment of female characters and queer identities and the like seemed to be enlightened and supportive, this simply doesn't fit. But I have to make it fit, and it's doing my head in - as it is, I think, for a large swathe of his readers.

It also stings paricularly because grief is partly anger, because what's been revealed about his personal proclivities for abusive sex with comparatively powerless women means that his public persona is a carefully crafted lie, designed to cover and enable his activities. I am angry because I feel stupid, as though I should have known. (I mean, I always hated his relationship with Amanda Palmer, who I intensely dislike for not particularly rational reasons beyond the age discrepancy and her brashness, but I blamed her for its dissonances, not him. He got me. Bastard.)

A lot of the discussions on social media from betrayed fans circle around the perennial problem of what the hell you do with your relationship with the art when the creator turns out to be a problematical dickhead. Sometimes this easy - I ditched Orson Scott Card and wossname, John C Wright (had to look him up) without a blink when I became aware of their respective frothing homophobias, their work never really mean that much to me. And the China Mieville jerking women around thing simply allowed me to admit how pretentiously intellectualised his work can be, despite its undoubted quality and originality. While I was fond of Harry Potter, I have always been aware of the books' flaws as literary works, and been frustrated by their conservative moral framework; JK's rampant TERFism was not a shock, and it has cost me absolutely nothing to boycott anything further from which she might profit, and retreat into HP fan fiction. Joss Wedon was a betrayal, but Buffy and Firefly were in the past, their loss is not as immediate. I have a harder time with Arcade Fire and Win Butler's sexual misconduct allegations, I love Arcade Fire, and I can't really listen to it any more without a sense of unease, so I listen to them a hell of a lot less than I used to. But I have bought and read, multiple times, pretty much everything Gaiman ever wrote, book-wise, and a fair chunk of his graphic novels. I have the giant Absolute Sandman tomes, for heaven's sake. I have Good Omens on DVD. I have written academic papers on him. Any way you slice it, that's a loss.

I don't know if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. I know it's far more likely, in our modern media age, that the relentless glare of the media spotlight will sooner or later discover horrible things about large numbers of our respected creators. No-one is perfect, and media - and humanity in general - love to dish the dirt, and the reality is that if the internet existed a hundred years ago we'd be cancelling cherished literary icons left, right and centre. And there may be an argument for trying to make that separation in order to still enjoy the work, but I can't. I cannot read or watch or listen without suspicion when I know the sordid details, and the suspicion, and consequent re-analysis of the work, spoils my enjoyment. TERFism is implicit in Harry Potter if you read it with the knowledge of JK's current frothings, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to find that Gaiman's female characters are rife with problems if I revisit them now, in the same way that Buffy is if you use the lens of Dickhead Joss. And that'll hurt.

So I have actually found Brandon Taylor's article about Alice Munroe to be strangely consoling, because he talks about precisely this betrayal in terms which mirror my own. And two of his comments really stay with me: one, "Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person." And two, "For myself, I will never read Alice Munro the same way again." This encapsulates it: three equal but competing truths. Brilliant writer. Dickhead. Tainted work.

My so far favourite response to this whole debacle, and the writer/cherished work relationship, is this tweet:

Part of me is also angry because this is such a waste. Gaiman had it all: respected body of work, iconic status among the fandom, a guaranteed market for Good Omens and Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, the high-budget cinematic adaptations which are in process at the moment, and which will unavoidably see less success than they could have because so many of us have a bad taste in our mouths. He was talking about working on a new book, which I will now not buy if he ever does publish it. He pissed all that away by being a dickhead and pretending he wasn't. He must have thought the structure of his achievements and his place in the fandom were unassailable. Now that it's all out in the open, they were - not precisely a lie, but an ill-built edifice threatening to totter, because we're looking at it harder, and bits of it are illusion over ugly gaps, and this is an ugly wind.

As my personal cosmic wossnames will obviously dictate, I am whiling away large chunks of this disability-ridden long-COVIDed existence by playing video games, which I can, by dint of careful rearrangement and at least one PC upgrade, do from my comfy armchair with my feet up. Which is useful, because I can only sit at my desk for about 20 minutes before the fatigue kicks me hard, so my usual PC-gamer proclivities were a bit hamstrung until I worked out how to connect the PC to the TV with an HDMI cord and found a controller that actually worked.

I am brain-fogged, and absolutely cannot play anything new, so it's old favourites up in here, with the difficulty dialed right down to the lowest level, a declension about which I decline to be embarrassed, I am simply not up to anything more demanding. I have played Skyrim through, again, twice (orc warrior with big sword and shield, no bows allowed! never done that before! she was great! and a separate mage playthrough just to prove I can, it's tactically far more demanding as Skyrim magic is underpowered, and I'm surprised I managed to make it work even on easy in my current state.) Then New Kitten happened, who can't take loud noises, so I went back to Stardew Valley, which is cute and gentle and doesn't alarm her unduly.

I love Stardew Valley, it's nicely written and cutely retro-pixellated and the gameplay is satisfying, and it hits repeatedly and precisely my personal buttons about Making Things Work and Tidying Things Up and Restoring Order. And its certifiably insane designer (honestly, it's one guy, he wrote and coded and scored and soundtracked and drew the entire bloody thing, Renaissance men also ran) randomly puts out free updates with mad new content every few years, and the last one came out a month ago and is delightful, and I've been happily discovering its whimsical new added bits with small, joyous yodels.

But it has this weird side effect, which is that it makes me miss my dad. It's a farming sim; you inherit an old, derelict farm and basically build it up to functionality from scratch, and you end up, after diligent pottering around through seasons and years, with these lovely rows of crops and woods and fruit trees and barns full of chickens and cows and goats. And my dad was an animal scientist and grew up on farms and worked on research stations, and I keep wishing he was still alive so I could show him the game; I think it would have amused him. Like most video games, its representation of reality is necessarily emblematic rather than realistic, it strips down the actions and goals to a symbolic minimum, exacerbated by the fact that it's low graphics and relative simplicity because of the indie format. So I am occasionally niggled by the fact that you don't grow cranberries in bogs, for example. Or you can cheerfully fill up your silos with hay you've harvested while it's raining, and it doesn't subsequently spontaneously combust. It should combust. Compressed damp hay goes eeeeeevil.

And every time I accidentally milk a cow from the front rather than the back end, which you can cheerfully do because you can access the milk gesture from any direction as the game doesn't distinguish, I imagine how my dad would mock the slightly insane result. But I also think he might have enjoyed playing it anyway, given its idealised, back-to-the-soil, escape-the-rat-race ethos, and the way it allows you to create a small world of farm functionality in an unrealistic but deeply soothing way.

Or maybe I'm projecting. Anyway. I love Stardew Valley, even if it makes me miss my dad. It's not an unhappy reminder of who he was, and it feels, across time and death, like a tiny connection. I'll take it.

Turns out having little to no executive function available is a bit of a drawback when trying to navigate the surprisingly complicated paths of cat-adoption. It really doesn't help that the adoptions centre of our local SPCA, while animal-friendly and clean and well designed and staffed with lovely, friendly, animal-loving people, is also deeply disorganised.

It took me several weeks to assemble the necessary paperwork - landlord permission, proof of residence (tricky, because I have no utilities bills coming to the house, eventually I used a vet bill) and a form rife with surprisingly personal questions. When I did finally submit everything and actually went out to the cattery and see the available kitties, there were only a handful of cats in the lineup, almost none of them corresponding to the website information. And I spent 20 minutes bonding with two beautiful little tortoiseshells and bounced out to say "them! I'll take them both!", and they'd been claimed by someone else the previous day. There is apparently a system there, but it really isn't administered properly: the website is nicely designed, the cages are lovely, there's a comprehensive info sheet attached to each cage, but half of it isn't filled in, and what is filled in clearly isn't updated with any regularity at all.

I am an extremely good administrator and someone who rejoices in facilitating the harmonious and effective design and implementation of systems. Our local SPCA did violence to my soul.

So in the event, when I'd eliminated the white cats (I cannot do the pink nose/cancer thing again, I honestly can't) and extricated, from three different clueless volunteers, an accurate account of which cats were actually available for adoption, there was only one actual option. The website said she was a year old, the cage sheet said 4 months, and when the SPCA people had uploaded her info to the chip database, it turns out her birthday was 21/09/2023, so she's... (counts on fingers...) nearly seven months old. She had been in the cattery since January and was clearly going stir crazy, and she was affectionate and friendly and playful and there was absolutely no way I was leaving her there.

So, once I'd waited four days for the SPCA to come and do a five-minute home inspection, I brought her home. This is Cirilla.

She has a sort of black cloak-and-hood effect, white legs and feet, black toe-beans (totes adorbs!) and that somewhat piratical white slash across one eye, which caused me to spend three days researching media characters with facial scars. Since I have obsessively played the Witcher video games and read a metric buttload of Witcher fanfic in the last year or two, and she's an amazing character (and doesn't die tragically and early, I learned the Jyn Erso lesson, at least) Ciri was the obvious choice. Bonus: when she's naughty, which is constantly, I can sternly employ the Full Name thing to maximum effect. "Princess Cirilla Fiona Elen Rhiannon, do not climb up the mosquito net!" It's ineffective, but satisfying.

Ciri has settled in very quickly, and has been cuddly and affectionate from the start; she sleeps up next to me at night and is very amenable to being picked up or to sitting on my lap. She's had some sort of mild trauma in early kittenhood because for the first few days any loud noise freaked her completely, I had to stop playing Skyrim because the first time I dragon shouted she hid under the sofa for half an hour. I am breaking her in to the video game thing slowly by playing lots of Stardew Valley, and she seems gradually to be realising that the noises in the TV or tablet are Not Actually Real. She also has a completely weird thing about tissues, or me blowing my nose, just holding a tissue in my hand made her run away at first. We are trying slow, careful introductions: tissue, kitten, kitten, tissue, and then the waiter removes the tissue. Again, she's improving, I can now make tiny elephant trumpeting noises with reasonable impunity.

As I type she's in her favourite morning position, sprawled out on the back of the armchair behind my head. She is a delight, I lucked out completely in the random cat acquisition stakes, and my house is much less empty. All praises to Bast.

I didn't actually blog at all in 2023; in retrospect, it's telling that my last post before the gap, in November 2022, was a brief and heart-felt complaint about post-COVID brain fog and fatigue. While this in the event was more than somewhat predictive, it means I missed both the 2022 retrospective, and, since I only started again this month, the 2023 one as well. As is traditional, I shall proceed to catch up both annual scorecards at once, hampered only slighty by the fact that I have no actual blog record of 2023 and am thus forced to rely on a memory which was already extremely dubious before COVID got its horrible little mitts on it. 2023, in particular, was A Year and needs to be memorialised.

Things achieved by me in 2022: COVID, thanks Obama. Significant techniques in dealing with the effectively doubled workload concomitant upon running parallel registration processes in person and online.

Things achieved by me in 2023: long COVID. Diabetes. Sufficient disinvestment from the demands of my job to be able to increasingly hand over my responsibilities in the face of incapacitating fatigue. A slim crowbar into the faculty's closed-minded inability to comprehend the amount of work I actually do for them in this role.

Things not achieved by me in 2022: Any sort of forward momentum in the greater life sense, especially in the areas of achieving a new job or fleeing the country.

Things not achieved by me in 2023: Any blog posts. Any sort of forward momentum in the greater life sense, especially in the areas of achieving a new job or fleeing the country. In retrospect, for once I actually have an excuse for this. Long COVID brain fog is a beast.

Losses in 2022: the Queen. Twitter, and, on a related note, the last pitiful dregs of Elon Musk's credibility. Noting for posterity that of the three, I only really mourn Twitter, and only slightly.

Losses in 2023: a significant chunk of my cognitive function.

Things discovered by me in 2022: bifocals, embittered cynicism about the efficacy of bifocals, Wordle, Waffle, Sudoku (extremely late to the party), JK Rowling disillusionment, TERF hatred, post-pandemic hermitting, burgeoning anti-monarchism, the Shivadh romances (despite my burgeoning anti-monarchism), breast abscesses (ouch), Merge Dragons (insert Gamer Shame here), feline senlility, Goncharov (Scorsese, 1973).

Things discovered by me in 2023: long COVID, brain fog, diabetes, disability benefits, insurance company hoop-jumping, evolving cultural critiques of the testing assumptions while taking cognitive assessments. Playing PC games on the TV with a controller, wrestling controller mods into submission despite the brain fog. My Time At Sandrock, Stray, the actually excellent Skyrim Switch port and the slightly less excellent Outer Worlds one. Growing ranunculus. Diabetes, acing the low-carb diet, adventures in diabetic baking, sugar-free chocolate.

Resolutions for 2024: kick this *(#%)&%* long COVID in its evil little teeth and resume a normal life.

My subject line is The Amazing Devil, again, one of my favourites of theirs.

... in re Pandy, loss of: do not try to play Stray for a bit, it doesn't go well.

So Stray is a wonderful little game, in which your avatar is a cat, and you guide it through a post-apocalyptic, vaguely cyberpunky cityscape that's utterly devoid of people, although full of their empty homes and businesses and artifacts, and instead houses a fairly sparse population of robots all going peaceably about their business. It's mostly exploration and route-finding, at least to date, with a bit of puzzle-solving and questing as you gradually construct the backstory narrative of the city and its weird, giant-cylindrical, abandoned environs (it's some kind of artificial habitat, I haven't got far enough to work out what, but the city's ceiling is circular and dotted with lights). You start out in a much more sylvan and beautiful environment, all overgrown vegetation and water and your happy cat colony, which seems to be inside the wall of the city. You then accidentally fall into the city and have to try and find your way back to your family, hence all the puzzle-solving and route-finding. You're not quite a standard cat, there is some kind of assumption of augmented intelligence in the puzzles you have to solve, but the little animations when you interact with bits of the city, drinking from puddles and scratching random bits of furniture and sleeping on cushions, are very feline and very adorable.

The game has the most amazing atmosphere - not just because you're playing a kitty, but in the gentle, wistful, slightly surreal flavour of the environment itself. The robots are enormously endearing, both your own little floating sidekick, and the angular, ungainly, slightly sad and vulnerable personas of the larger npc robots you encounter. My favourite so far is one little mini-quest where you can find bits of sheet music scattered throughout the world and bring them back to the guitar-playing robot, and he'll play them for you - lovely, gentle, jazzy, bluesy tunes (mostly), and you can either sit and listen, or curl up on the cushion next to him and sleep while he plays.

But. The minimal sense of threat in the game (at least so far, I'm fairly early on) comes from the zurks, which are horrible little red-eyed robot crab things that occur in swarms and will chase and eat anything living - which, so far, is only your kitty self. (My current theory is that the zurks ate all the people, leaving only robots, and cats.) If you don't evade them (which is tricky, memo to anyone else inspired to try this, don't try to play on PC with a keyboard, it's optimised for controller and the keyboard interface is horrible and will make you fail to outrun zurks inevitably and repeatedly) you are swarmed, and your poor little kitty is eaten. It's not graphic, you are simply piled by zurks, but I cannot, it transpires, handle even the minor glimpses of the little recumbent dead kitty-form amid the swarm at this stage of my personal cat journey, it's deeply traumatic even though you immediately reload at the last save point absolutely fine.

So, yes. I love this game, but it's on temporary hold, despite my jonesing for a kitty-fix, until I am not likely to be traumatised by losing my feline avatar. Which is a pity, because I'm dying to see how it turns out, and to deepen my acquaintance with the world. Ace game design, ten out of ten, would recommend. Just not when grieving a cat.

Pandora (2004-2024)

All the best cats just happen to you - the universe bestows them, not so much randomly as inevitably. I inherited Pandora in 2015, courtesy of Phleep&Jo, who could only take two of their four cats when they emigrated to Scotland. Their loss was immeasurably my gain; my relatively new landlord having cheerfully agreed to up the permitted cat count in my house from one to two, I moved Pandora in with Hobbit. A year and a half later, when I lost Hobbit, I moved Jyn in with Pandora, only to lose Jyn a year or two later. While she was a feisty old thing who insisted on respect (see: massive growling sessions at the vet, including her last moments on the euthanasia table), Pandy was basically also a sweetheart; she settled down relatively quickly into more or less affectionate relationships with both other cats. When she died, Pandy was pushing twenty years old, having been with me for nearly 10: a venerable grande dame who had survived both my other two cats and Jo's other three, possibly by sheer force of personality.

Pandora was named already when I acquired her, and it suited her too well for me to want to change it. It was a good name for riffing: when I talked to her, which was continuously, she was Pandorable, Pandable, Pandorica, Pandemonium, Pandlebar Moustache. She was a smallish cat, round and solid with round eyes that tended to look a bit astonished, and her black fur actually an overlay on a very faint silver tabby you could see in sunlight. She had particularly thick fur, although it wasn't especially long, and her undercoat was very dense and fine, and shed itself in wild, enthusiastic drifts in spring, leaving kitten-sized furballs under the bed. Petting her in the shedding season created a small choking cloud, and I suspect she took a certain vindictive satisfaction in being a fur-bomb in the vet's room.

She was a Personality: vocal, demanding, highly opinionated, but affectionate and needing constant contact. If I was at my desk, gaming on my PC, or during the lockdown work-at-home days, she'd sleep on the chair in my study (on her heating pad in winter, because she was arthritic and I indulged her ridiculously), and I have more than once had to apologise for her vocal contributions to Teams meetings. She was always underfoot in the kitchen. Always. Unlike Jyn, she loved laps, and her last few months, with me more or less perpetually collapsed in an armchair, had her continually fighting the controller or keyboard for space. She always slept with me at night, curled up tight against me, and usually making a sort of hammock out of the mosquito net by sleeping against it - she's probably the most tactile cat I've ever owned. She made her demands extremely known, either by yelling (standing in front of the water bowl and mewing because it wasn't fresh enough for her exacting tastes) or head-butting me (wanting me to move over in bed so she could climb under the duvet and nest).

She was, unlike Jyn, an extremely healthy cat, and when I dug out her vetbook and worked out how old she was a couple of years ago, the vet refused to believe she was actually 18, he said she was in nearly perfect condition. She lived cheerfully for most of the last decade with a large fatty growth on her front leg, which was a lipoma, benign, until the last year or so, when its development into a slow-growing mast cell tumour seemed to make no difference to her overall health or comfort. It was also only in the last year or two that she started to become arthritic, which we managed very successfully with the prescription kibble, and a bit senile, having sudden vocal panics where she forgot where I was, or she was, or where the food or litterbox were. (I have to ascribe to the senility her acquired tendency to attempt to drink the tea out of my mug, which she was frequently catastrophically prone to in the last few months of her life). But what got her in the end was her kidneys, shrivelled to tiny sizes. In the last few months she was hardly eating, no longer round but thin, feeling small and fragile and bird-boned when I cuddled her, and the toxin levels in her body simply overwhelming the special diet.

I had not realised how close and intense my relationship with Pandy had become, although in retrospect given COVID and lockdown and my increasing ill health over the last year, it was inevitable. She and I were alone in the house together for days and months at a time over the last few years, revolving contentedly around each other in a comfortable companionship where we knew and had accommodated each other's quirks. Our space-sharing routine had all the rough edges worn smooth. While I am so glad I could give her that closeness in her declining years, it's been very hard on me to suddenly lose it. Although I had been expecting to lose her sometime in the next year or so, her deterioration was very sudden; I had an unexamined expectation that my next six months or so at home working through long COVID would be in her slightly cranky company, and it was a brutal realisation that it wouldn't.

I also didn't expect to lose her on the day I brought her in for the vet to check her over, I thought she was being picky over food rather than continuously nauseated, so I wasn't braced for his recommendation to call it, and had allowed too many lasts - last sleep on my bed, last cuddle in my lap, last time licking Laxapet off my finger - to go unmarked. It consequently feels as though she's been ripped out of my life, leaving a jagged-edged wound. I had to clear all of her stuff - beds, bowls, brushes, toys - away into a cupboard almost as soon as I got back from the vet, because finding them in the house was making me cry. It still is.

She was a dear companion, and a Personality, and a loved and joyful strand in my life, and my missing her is a hole in my chest. I can, and probably will, fill the bleak emptiness and silence of my house with another cat, but I miss Pandora for her complete and characteristic cat-self, and with love and thanks, always will.

(Subject line quote is The Amazing Devil, because they really do excessive emotion so well).

Right, so, I lost a cat yesterday (Pandora, kidney failure, not yet up to talking about it), and my house is empty and there is no-one for me to talk to, and apparently I am driven back into the embrace of blogging because Teh Internets may or may not substitute for the largely one-sided conversations one has with a kitty underfoot. I have no idea if anyone is still reading Dreamwidth, I suspect not, but I am a bit of a mess and need to string words together as a coping mechanism.

This is the first time I have ever lost a cat who was my only cat; in all other previous losses I have been able to come home and hug the other cat to fill the void. And I can't, and the void is horrible. I have tried to round up all Pandy's stuff to stash in a cupboard where I won't keep seeing it, but keep running across something I've forgotten, and it triggers a new round of helpless crying. So this is a thicket of words between me and the absence. I think the loss is worse because I'm pretty much alone at home, not working, and have consequently had a fairly close and intense relationship with Pandy over the last six months or so.

The Granny Weatherwax subject line is valid, but I cannot say I've been at full health and vigor over the last year, my inner Granny Weatherwax has been somewhat subdued. I think I blogged the COVID bout I had at the end of 2022, which was, significantly enough, around the time that my blogword reservoirs dried up and I vanished from haunts of blog. That's because I ended up with long COVID, which has rendered the last year or so increasingly difficult. I have been at home for the last four months, not working at all beyond answering the occasional WhatsApp plea from a desperate person trying to fill my complicated shoes at short notice; over the second half of last year I was working mostly from home, with breaks of several weeks when my lovely doctor booked me off, in a desperate attempt to rest and address the fatigue. I'm now formally on disability, having wrestled various insurance companies finally into submission.

Long COVID is a horrible beast, as well as being a diagnosis one arrives at by elimination, after testing for everything else. It's hit me mainly with cognitive issues, with a side order of surprise!diabetes, although there's some physical fatigue. I cannot handle crowds, restaurants or background noise; I cannot do more than one thing in a day, which cannot take any longer than an hour or two; I cannot sit at my desk for longer than about half an hour. I am typing this from my armchair, my feet up, with my computer plugged into the TV screen and the keyboard on my lap. Things I have learned to do in the last few months: persuade PC games to work with a controller. Challenging, because the brain fog is horrible. I can also only play games I have played before, and I have to dial the difficulty down to the minimum, because strategically and in terms of co-ordination, I suck. This is causing shame to my gamer's soul.

My short term memory is shot, my executive function is non-existent. I haven't trusted myself to check a student transcript in about eight months. I am losing nouns in conversation at a horrible rate for someone of my literary proclivities and training; if you give me one of those cognitive tests where you have to list all the words you can think of starting with a particular letter in a minute, I manage about five, slowly, and then blank. I am an English PhD grad with a ridiculously large vocabulary, so this is, to say the least, terrifying.

Oh, and my emotional regulation is also extremely iffy. I will burst into tears at the slightest provocation, or lose my temper when minimal things go wrong. I am on disability at least partially because I should not be around students at this stage of my health crisis, the slightest hint of the average student post-adolescent narcissim and I'll infallibly bite someone's head off and spit out the skull with a genteel "ptooey" before collapsing in a sobbing heap on the corpse. Not, shall we say, professional.

I miss Pandy so much. The house is so empty. My state of fatigue has been emotionally muffling me a bit over the last few months, I haven't had the energy for, e.g., guilt at letting people other than me toss themselves into the crater of the orientation/registration volcano god, but this is the worst cat loss I have ever experienced, it's almost physical pain. I may have to go and find another cat almost immediately because apparently being a home-bound crazy cat lady without a cat leaves only the crazy.

Cat Valente's short story 'The difference between love and time' just turned my brain inside out, in a good way, and now I'm crying. On Tor.com.

In other news, Cat Valente continues to be my literary girl crush.

In other, other news, the COVID brain fog also continues, in the last week I have distinguished myself by taking 4 hours to train curriculum advisors, which usually takes 2, necessitating a complete second session and a catchup set of notes on the examples we didn't have time for. Running training feels weird - what I say is coherent, apparently, but I don't have my usual fairly efficient and incisive control over the ideas I'm presenting. Bugger COVID, anyway. Horrible little thing. I still have a lyric-soprano-in-a-garret cough.

I am quite spectacularly tired, and going into three months of exam committees, orientation and registration. Yay.

Ok, that's fair. If I have to get COVID, which is completely inevitable given that we are back on campus and no-one is masking, at least I can spend my week's self-isolation entertaining myself by watching Elon Musk get owned so hard on Twitter that his great-great-grandchildren are going to be flinching at birdsong, blue tick marks and the term "free speech" without realising why.

Twitter has always been a cesspool, on which isolate rafts of civility float precariously; at its best, it replicates the pleasures of the Latin epigrammatists, its format lending itself to everything that is pithy, witty and vicious. Elon's blindly self-indulgent acquisition of the platform in the name of "free speech" and the cause of billionaire flexing, appears to have neglected to consider the probable result if those qualities, particularly the last, are trained on him rather than the world at large when he inevitably screws it up, as he has done near-instantaneously and with horrible efficiency. (The parade of blue-tick celebrities "impersonating" Musk has been a sustained and delightful exercise in political, collaborative performance art.) His acquisition of the platform is an exercise in classical hubris, and there is a massive satisfaction in watching him, having chainsawed himself off at the knees in blithe arrogance, topple inexorably into financial and reputational ruin while the gods laugh. Couldn't happen to a nastier asshole. I hope it tanks Tesla. Possibly cosmic justice does, in fact, exist.

In other news, I have COVID, and am, according to the nice pharmacist who stuck swabs up my nose, "extremely infectious", the test apparently bounded so fast and so hard into "positive" that the needle, metaphorically speaking, quivered. I feel like fifteen sorts of crap, and am spending my time attempting, at intervals, to eject my own lungs by convulsion. Also, for some reason this stupid version of the bug is making me cough violently and then sneeze, equally violently, six or seven times in succession immediately afterwards, it's maddening. Apart from the brain fog being an absolutely real thing, apparently COVID makes you explode.

It's a week, is all. About the only thing I can say about it is that mercifully the COVID has hit now, instead of in two weeks' time when I am running wall-to-wall advisor and exam committee training and wading my way through enormous scads of board schedules, cursing. While there is a sort of vindictive satisfaction, not unakin to the Elon-downfall pleasure, in contemplating how hard the faculty would have to jump around to plug the gaps if COVID took me out at the truly active juncture, it's really not worth the mopping up.

Elon won't get to mop up. Elon is going to be in little itty bitty chunks, looking surprised and betrayed, on the floor. Elon is screwed.

I took Pandora to the vet on Friday for a checkup, because I am concerned about her level of what the Splendid Vet calls "vocalisation", which is to say, she yells at me more or less continuously. I have been worried that this might actually be pain, probably from her ongoing arthritis problem, so wanted him to check her out (and incidentally clip her claws, which I can only do one foot at at time in rotation, since she lasts only approximately five nails before trying to bite me). So he prodded her all over and inspected her teeth, handling manfully and with some admiration the choking cloud of fur which results (she has an incredibly thick and beautiful coat, black with a very faint grey tabby, with a very fine and enthusiastic undercoat), and pronounced her, overall, ridiculously healthy for a 17-year-old cat. She's put on a bit of weight, her teeth are great, she is eating well and using the litterbox appropriately, she has slight pain in her spine from the arthritis, but didn't try to bite him when he poked it, so clearly not too bad.

He thinks it's probably age, hence slight senility, hence anxiety, hence the rise in yelling - she forgets where she is for a moment, or where I am, and panics about it. If it gets too bad we can try Prozac, but it isn't at that level yet. She is still spending the nights blissfully curled up against me, so isn't losing me and yelling about it while I'm trying to sleep. And to rule out the pain issue, he gave me a course of five mild kitty painkillers, to try over five days and see if it changes the yelling behaviour any.

So I dutifully pilled her that evening, to her indignation, but I'm actually quite good at it and she didn't spit it out. And we spent Saturday with absolutely no diminishment in the yelling (as expected), but I came dutifully to pill her on Saturday night. And... the little white pill sleeve was not on the kitchen counter where I had left it. Or on the floor. Or outside in the courtyard (because hypothetical random gusts of wind, although I don't think we had any that day). Or in the kitty-stuff drawer with the Laxapet and what have you. Or on any of the other kitchen surfaces. Or drawers. Or in the recycling, in case I'd accidentally thrown it out with something. Or in the rubbish bin, ditto. Or in my study, or next to the tv, or in my bedroom, or any of the other places I might have absent-mindedly put it down on Friday night. Or in any other drawers, cupboards or hideaways where I might have stashed it as a Logical Place. It had softly and silently vanished away, with worrying completeness.

It remained vanished throughout Sunday. And I had resigned myself to not, in fact, doing the pain test, or at least contacting the vet on Monday and somewhat shamefacedly asking for replacement meds. Until I was cooking supper on Sunday night, and cleared away after I'd finished chopping stuff, and realised, with some shock, that a white square of kitty pill sleeve was sitting innocently on the black kitchen counter, as though it had never left. I will swear blind it was not there all Sunday. It was actually mildly freaky, I have clearly been watching too much Stranger Things, because I entertained a moment's wild fear that someone had been coming in through the courtyard door and messing with me by Moving Stuff Around.

But I don't think so. I think I swept it up with Saturday night's cooking endeavours (tiny one-person roast leg of lamb because I randomly felt like it) and tidied it into the vegetable crisper in the fridge, caught up in the packaging for carrots or cauliflower or something. And then swept it back out again with Sunday's supper (lamb shawarma, with leftover roast), caught up with tzatziki ingredients, cucumber or spring onion or whatever. In both sweepings, I remained utterly oblivious to its hitch-hikery activities, hence the Mysterious Reappearance. It had a pleasant day chilling in the 'fridge, and I had a frustrated day wondering if I had, in fact, started gently going mad.

I am relieved that I am not, in fact, gently going mad, or at least not any madder than having to deal with my Cherished Institution's current fuckwitteries is otherwise driving me. So I can finish the pain test, despite being fairly confident that it'll continue to make not one iota of difference to Pandora's yell levels, but remain reassured that I am being a Good Cat Owner and Covering All Bases, although faintly guilty that I have to actually leave the house occasionally, thereby causing her anxiety. But it's weirdly helped, being able to put a cause to it, it's making me less annoyed and more sympathetic to the yelling. She is a poor old slightly demented thing, but actually, at base, very healthy and mostly happy. I'll take it.

I am sure I am not the only person in the vicinity of this blog who has succumbed to Wordle. Everyone has succumbed to Wordle. I have definitely succumbed to Wordle, it causes me, mainly, a small infusion of joy every morning, with only occasional forays into swearing and resentment as I get three green squares by the second line and then go through four iterations trying to find the right letters for the gaps because it's a madly common word pattern and there are umpteen possibilities. But it's a good omen for the day when one has one of those Wordle moments when it all slots beautifully into mental place and I solve it in thirty seconds and three lines, cackling madly.

In the Department of Wordle-Specific moments, see also: Swearing At American Spellings; That's Not A Real Word How Dare; Fuck I Forgot I'd Ruled Out That Letter; WhatsApping Mother To Whinge Commiseratingly About Today's Wordbeast; The Rare And Radiant Smugness Of A Two Line Guess; The Equally Rare And Overpowering Shame of 'Whew'.

We all, I think, owe grateful thanks and possibly a small inscribed thesaurus to the gentlebeing who casually brought Wordle into existence in a moment of partnerly affection. It is, like all proper varieties of benign cultural obsession, a strangely simple and elegant thing. But it has also, I suspect, awoken a hitherto-unsuspected hunger in many of us for the pure and precise joy of the linguistic puzzle, the happy little dopamine hit of a miniature, self-contained solution. Which is why these games have tended to proliferate all over Teh Internets over the last few months, as creative types leap on bandwagons in all directions, and which is why I have twinned my morning Wordle with Waffle.

Waffle is somewhat different but equally pleasing: a five-by-five square crosshatching six five-letter words, with the letters scrambled up among them, and a similar colour coding to Wordle of orange or green letters to denote correct or adjacent positions. Requires the same mix of furious vocabulary-rifling while mentally repositioning specific letters. Voted more likely than Wordle to make one randomly crave severely unhealthy breakfast foods. And has two incredibly pleasing aspects lacking in Wordle: one, the six words are glossed below the grid when you've cracked it, which I find pleasantly educational. And two: the creator has a lovely line in cheery little affirmations when you pull off the reshuffle with four or five moves to spare, with a surprisingly large array of different ones so each morning is a happy little yodel to a different tune. Which culminated, this morning, in the below:

It's very validating. I bumble off into the rest of my day feeling Skilled and Successful. And possibly also Hyperlinguistic and Educated. Which are all very good things.

(Subject line is, of course, the Bee Gees, as is only appropriate in a post about letters).

It transpires that there is actually a limit to the number of times one (or in this case, I) can play Stardew Valley over and over again without a break. It's a high, but real number. When I have, once again, tamed the farm, delved to the bottom of the dungeons, befriended the village and married my romance du jour, I can only immediately start a new game, oh, six goes out of seven. (I may, in fact, have a slightly unhealthy addiction to Stardew Valley, it prods with pinpoint accuracy at my personal button labelled "make systems work"). The seventh time, I start casting around for something new, slight and frivolous to play upon the Ipad of an evening when lounging in bed, cat-bestrewn and shutting down my brain for sleep. This has brought me Fallout Shelter (fun for two goes, now boring), occasional outbreaks of Solitaire or Plants vs Zombies, a number of unsuccessful forays into things that Simply Failed To Grip, and, most recently, Merge Dragons.

I am vaguely ashamed of Merge Dragons. It is the epitome of a casual game in the sense denigrated by "Real Gamers": cutesy, superficial, and in mechanical terms apparently simplistic (merge three or five of the same thing to get a fancier version of same! Rinse, repeat!). There is a strategic element to it, but only just. It is rife with Adorable, TM, Cartoon Dragons who float busily over the landscape, harvesting and building and being merged to make higher beings.

It is also fiendishly, machiavellianly, shamelessly, mercenarily manipulative.

Merge Dragons proliferates the possible types of dragons, the objects they can harvest (life orbs, coins, seeds, sprouts, etc), the objects they can harvest from (trees, flowers, mushrooms, hills, lakes, buildings, grasses, etc etc etc), and the flavour, configurations and environments in which said objects are located, to a quite ludicrous extent; it is always throwing off special events, new packages, fancier dragons. In terms of areas offering variations on gameplay, I can pursue merging random objects in my home camp; my dragon houses; puzzle levels; a dragon quest zone; Arcadia; the tower (sheer chance with randomised goblins, I hate it, I am whatever the exact opposite of a gambler is); or the annoying arena of the special event, with its new spanky dragon types and specialised tokens of some sort. Were I not a reclusive misanthrope, I could share (presumably) dragons with other real-world players in dragon dens. In the month or so I've been playing it has offered me Egyptian dragons, Viking dragons, dessert dragons (really, that's not a typo), aquatic dragons, gem settings, beach settings, zodiac settings, Unspecified-Oriental settings, and whatever the hell that mad clockwork thing is. In terms of iconage and nomenclature, I cannot acquit the game of unpleasant cultural appropriation and stereotyping at a number of points, but other than that it's generally not without its own slightly plastic charm.

However. Said slightly plastic charm is clearly and evidently also the product of a crack team of marketing primates, deterministic behaviourists, Dark Side statisticians (i.e. statisticians), and designers who have had key creative organs surgically removed and replaced with actual dollar signs. Because this is a free game app. You can download it freely, and can for a while freely and happily pursue the above dragon-wrangling, harvesting, coin-accumulating existence, merrily merging things for fun and profit, until you run to the carefully-judged edge of the easy bit, and into the game's entrapment zone. You are forced to face the fact that to proceed further you have to either grind mercilessly at a snail's pace, or speed things up by spending real world cash to acquire dragon gems, which will open treasure chests, buy fancier dragons or allow you to acquire key items to merge at strategic points so you can unlock further merge opportunities.

I can confidently attribute the fact that I have not spent thousands on this stupid game to the fortuitous (or possibly prescient) circumstance that I have set my Ipad to require me to re-enter my password every time I buy something from the app store, and I can never remember my password. Since I am generally playing in bed at night and am warm and comfortable enough that I won't drag myself out of bed to go and look it up, mostly I don't buy dragon gems. By such fragile bulwarks do we save ourselves.

Because, here's the thing, I can absolutely see exactly what they're doing. I am wholly aware of the careful build-up they've created, where you have just enough easy wins at first, and have earned some rewards, and can see potentially very nice perks and loot waiting just ahead, except that either you first have to spend several hours mind-numbingly making dragons harvest life orbs so you can get past the &^)(#%*(% dead plant zone into the area where you can merge again... or you can dump actual money into dragon gems and take a short cut. Or use them to buy the cute, fancy dragon eggs you can't buy with coins or find in any of the areas. Or make the dragon gem payout which will save your accumulated loot in the tower if a goblin gets you. And I know what they're doing, I can see exactly how I'm being manipulated, and it's still compelling enough that at times, when I have randomly remembered my password and really want that loot, I have to rugby-tackle my own fingers to prevent myself from pressing the button to buy. Sometimes I miss. I was never big on sport, anyway. I have paid less for this game overall to date than I would have for a premium large-scale RPG, but honestly I'm not sure if that's much of a recommendation given the pricing structures of AAA games.

So I think I find myself, primarily, bemused at all this: by all the precedents, this stupid game should not be keeping my attention, and I suspect it's only doing so because I'm tired and COVID-bludgeoned and post-lurgified and don't have the brain for much more. Further thesis: I play a lot during load shedding, when there isn't much else to do. So in fact I might actually be able to at least partially blame Eskom for the whole debacle. Eskom and the Merge Dragons marketing primates. Yup. All their fault.

But I also think that the siren call of Stardew Valley will reassert itself eventually, possibly when my irritation at the commodification of my gameplay has finally filled its gauge and I delete the whole bloody thing in a fit of pique. Because really, it's dangerously addictive candyfloss with a carcinogenic core.

he's back! my giant spider made a spirited attempt to recolonise my bedroom this morning, ambling in through the window with considerable nochalance while I was lying in bed drinking tea. To which I said "hell no!" and did the Cup Trick again (with considerable more ease given it was daylight and I intelligently opened the back door first), and tossed him successfully and with elegant dispatch into the far corner of the garden. If he tries again I shall take him out the front of the house and dump him in the hedge across the road, this is ridiculous.

I think he must be a rain spider, apparently they come into the house when it's about to rain, which it is, because they don't like getting wet. Sensible, really, if a bit inexplicable in purely evolutionary terms, what did they do before houses? but I am not down for a spider tenant. Also, this is, according to Teh Internets, the season when the males wander around searching for a lady love. While both Pandora and I are definitely ladies, neither of us is spider-sexual, so I'm afraid he's a bit doomed.

My skin is crawling again. Bleah.

I am currently locked in an Epic and Death-Defying territorial battle with a large spider (either one of those non-poisonous flat wall jobs or a rain spider, I keep forgetting to take a photo for better ID) who appears to be bound and determined to reside in my small abode, whether I like it or not. I have randomly assigned him male gender for no adequately defined reason, the way he waved his legs at me threateningly seemed a bit boyish (also possibly by way of Cosmic Balance since my late lamented orb weavers in the garden were definitely female, given their small husbands huddling nervously at the edge of the web). He is a fairly respectable size, about 10cm across his spread legs, and he clearly comes into the kitchen from the courtyard, he spent about three days lurking in the corner above the glass door.

So, in purely abstract terms, I have no beef with spiders. They are fascinating, and frequently beautiful, and wierdly and satisfyingly alien in shape, and fill an important ecological niche, and I'm generally quite happy to have them bumbling around my ceilings doing arachnoid cull projects on the local mosquito population while I hold occasional one-sided conversations in which I cordially wish them good hunting. I don't dust away occupied webs, and I certainly don't kill spiders, and I will cheerfully rescue any trapped members of the species from the sink (or the bath, had this house a bath, which it doesn't) and put them outside.

But. Atavistic hind-brain functions being what they are, spiders above a certain size make my skin crawl. I am happy with them being on the ceiling in the kitchen, but if one's in my bedroom I can't sleep. It's not even a conscious fear of a poisonous bite, although I would imagine that's the purpose behind the evolutionary aversion - it's rather that the mere idea of all those legs skittering over my flesh is deeply disturbing.

So this member of the tribe has been unusually persistent, and the other night started migrating away from the door towards the bedroom in a way that was simply Not On. I tried my usual infallible technique, which is to poke at him gently with the end of the broom and herd him out of the door into the night, but he took grave exception to that, and simply bunched in his corner and waved his legs. When I persisted, he leaped madly away, startling me into a slightly unladylike screech, and went to ground in the curtains on the glass door. Since I couldn't think of any way to remove him, I muttered imprecations and went to bed, slightly goose-bumped and resolutely leaving the curtains unclosed.

I didn't see him for two days, and thought, hooray, the broom-pokage clearly offended him enough that he left in a Marked Manner. Except. Last night, there he was, on the wall above my bed, approximately at head height, thereby executing a flanking offensive aimed straight at my weak spots with commendable tactical acumen. To make things worse, his presence became apparent (a) at the precise moment when, having read peaceably in bed for an hour, I was about to close down the Ipad to sleep, and (b) under the effects of our current national affliction of load shedding, now at stage six, what the actual fuck, and depriving us of power for anything up to six hours a day. So. Spider, Right There Above My Bed, In the Pitch Dark, it was sheer luck that I moved the torch around to catch him on the wall before switching it off.

There was absolutely no way I was sleeping with him there. The likelihood of him actually leaving the wall to climb onto my bed, mosquito net or person was extremely slim, but tell that to my skin, which at that point was making a spirited attempt to crawl completely off my body and nest on top of my head. (In a perfectly nasty confluence of events, I'd spent the afternoon having the jolly bi-annual mammogram, so was not, shall we say, entirely at peace with my own body anyway, given several hours spent half naked while strangers alternately squidged and prodded my hapless boobs and made comments about them being "busy" and "active". My skin was already sending me rude telegrams even before the spider transpired).

There was nothing for it but the Cup Trick, as learned at my mother's knee. So what ensued was basically a Complicated Juggling Act, initially for Spider, Plastic Cup, Torch and Cardboard Sheet, in which I stuck the clear plastic lentil jar, emptied of lentils, over him and slid a sheet of card under him to trap him. Gibbering slightly, I might add (I'd say me not him, but he was probably feeling something similar), but with, I thought, commendably steady hands. Act 2 was more complicated, because at this point, holding a plastic container at arm's length with a death-grip on the cardboard sheet to make sure he couldn't escape (he was exploring his clear plastic prison with a certain suggestion of what-the-hell and considerably more animation than the Sandman in a similar situation) and the torch clamped under my arm, I arrived at the back door to realise I had foolishly neglected to open it first. This left me with the additional elements of Curtains, Key, Security Gate and Door to juggle with absolutely no hands owing to death-grip and torch.

So, it transpires that modern technology clearly trumps the Atavistic Skin-Crawling, because apparently I have absolutely no problem with jamming a large spider in a plastic cup against my midriff while holding his cardboard lid on in the aforementioned death-grip, using the other hand to navigate the door-opening, and with the torch propped on the egg basket to illumine the torrid scene. It appears that a solid layer of plastic nicely neutralises the usual need to leap six feet backwards from Large Spiders and obsessively check every inch of my clothing in case they've climbed on me while I wasn't looking.

Thereafter it was anticlimactic: I shook him down gently into the bottom of the container, removed the cardboard with the self-congratulatory flourish of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under a full formal dinner service, and flung him gently, but with authority, into the hedge. Then I went to bed and slept like a baby, with a strangely smug sense of competence and Triumph Against The Odds. With any luck this whole proceeding will outrage him enough that he won't try to return.

I do like spiders, really. In the abstract. Not in the flesh. Not my flesh, anyway.

you know, I think that epic month-long 'flu may, in retrospect, actually have been COVID, because I am still not right - still coughing, phlegmy, tired, tending to throw out random medical wossnames to no fixed pattern. (Second breast abscess in a year! wtf? why the hell should my Truly Weird Boobs spontaneously generate deep-seated abscesses to no fixed pattern or purpose, by way of Interesting Addition to their existing tendencies to fibroids, cysts and Generalised Bra Loathing? the abscesses hurt like hell and make me feel like death, and the necessary 10-day antibiotic course to suppress them makes me feel only marginally less like curling up into a ball like a woodlouse and trying to hibernate for a decade or two. And then a UTI. Yay.)

And, of course, I don't know if the epic month-long 'flu was actually COVID or not because at the time, I couldn't find a COVID testing centre, and the doctor more or less shrugged and told me to self-isolate for ten days just in case. This country has, for reasons best known to itself but probably not unrelated to our very large segment of population living near the poverty level, proliferated COVID testing centres rather than making self-administered COVID tests freely available. Which is all fine and well, there was a drive-through testing station on Main Road a minute away from my house for two years, except of course we lifted lockdown and mask mandates about three weeks before my 'flu hit (which, suspicious timing, anyway), and the testing centres all folded their tents in the night and stole away. I have subsequently discovered, way after the fact, that my local pharmacist will still administer a COVID test on request, but nobody seems to sell them.

It's Schroedinger's Pandemic again. Although it's still around, we are studiously all looking in the other direction and going "la la la", so it's not really happening. Which I know is really a function of relatively high vaccination levels and a reasonable degree of exposure immunity, and most people who catch it are vaccinated and don't get it seriously, but still, it feels very laissez faire. (My mum informs me that the husband of a school friend caught it, spent six weeks in a coma and died earlier this year, so it's definitely still out there, but he was for no adequately defined reason not actually vaccinated, which seems mad under the circs).

Anyway. One result of lockdown for two years has been that I didn't use any of my medical leave allocation at all for that period. I've used ten days of it in the last month and a half. I am surprised to find myself thinking of lockdown with frankly wistful nostalgia - it seems to be better for my physical health as well as mental. But apparently in later life I am regressing to Princess in Tower mode. Despite the potentially significant fact that I have been randomly growing my hair long again, I shall resolutely ignore any potential princes.

Whew, one of those half-year blogging hiatuses again, funny how they creep up on me. I think remote working, and the concomitant ability to not leave the house or speak to actual humans for days at a time, is actively reducing my general communication skills. Or, in other words, the pointer on the Isolate-O-Tron has dipped from "Hedgehoggy Hermit" to "Homicidally Misanthropic", a considerable drop from its pre-COVID standard levels of "Awkward at Parties/Disinclined To Leave the House". I always did have to arm-wrestle myself, best of two falls out of three, to force my own attendance at any given social gathering. Now I've apparently kiboshed the wrestle at the outset by stealing my own elbows. Metaphorically speaking. Physically they are still more or less attached. I mean, I can still type, so have no real excuse.

All of the above, incidentally, not to cast any aspersions on the generally much-appreciated virtual presence of anyone who still does drive by this venue occasionally to see if I'm burbling. Virtually you are all lovely and much less likely to make the Isolate-O-Tron's needle quiver, and I really have no excuse for abandoning you.

I am driven to resume blogging, characteristically enough, by the burning need to record for posterity a particular dream I just had. My sleep patterns are a mess again, mostly because I've just had a month-long run-in with a particularly epic case of 'flu, and went off both the antibiotics and the decongestants only a couple of days ago. Since the combination of meds was making me sleep 9-hour nights like a particularly coshed dormouse, going off them has led to those happy evenings lying in bed for hours at a time with eyes wide open like the millstone eyes of the tinder-box dogs in the fairy tale, feeling the sleepless seconds drip by with equal parts horror and despair. Insomnia is a bitch. And when I do actually sleep, it's lightly, and with interruptions, and I wake up earlier. Hating the universe in general and everything in it in particular, see "Homicidal Misanthropy", above. But I do, in all that disruption, remember far more of my dreams.

Said dreams characterised themselves, a few days ago, by degenerating into actual nightmare, with far more gore than I am wont to experience, dream-wise. I blame the Queen, for dying. Because the generally sad and laudatory nature of the media and social media responses are giving me ingrowing postcolonial irritation and the tendency to mutter darkly about hypocrisy and jingoism and denialism about the current parlous state of the British economy, culture, political landscape and royal family (racism, sex scandals, legislative meddling and black-market cash deals, oh lord). Which is all filtering into my dreams, causing me to dream the following:

a darkly threatening forest setting at night, occupied by:
several small/innocent children, and;
a team of servants, tasked with nobbling the above for the consumption of:
the Queen, characterised for these purposes as:
a Fallout robobrain robot, which looks like:
this:

except with the Queen's head attached in place of the glass dome, and the additional, horrifying detail of:
an unnaturally large mouth, opening unnaturally wide to reveal:
rows of enormous, long, jagged, horrifying teeth, with which:
she proceeded to bite off some poor child's arm, lots of blood and screaming, and I woke up.

I do not like this monarchy. It is skraaaaatched. As are my sleep cycles. I should add, also for posterity, however, that playing injudicious amounts of Fallout 4 is (a) satisfyingly apposite to the current state of global geo-political meltdown, (b) satisfying to the general state of homicidal misanthropy, as I wander around with a maxed out plasma rifle and sniping skill taking down deathclaws with single headshots, and (c) apparently colonising the dream landscape.

(my subject line, by usual processes of free association, is David Bowie, "Time").

oh thank the cosmic wossnames, this third attempt at new glasses actually works, I can both read and see the computer screen. Conversely, distance is now a bit fuzzy, but I suppose I can use the previous, inadequate pair (no close vision, also hurt my nose) for driving and watching movies. Not that I ever watch movies any more. Or drive, very much. Yay, pandemic. Anyway, I thought the poor little optometrist lady was going to weep with joy when I pronounced these ones fit for purpose, I shudder to think how much the two remakes have cost them. They've been very sweet about it.

The lens prescription is now fine, but this pair was hurting the hell out of my ears, and it's all been a bit of a revelation: I have never before in my life had a glasses prescription which wasn't correctly made, or frames which were actually uncomfortable to wear. I've always been able to put on a new pair of specs and hie me into the wild blue yonder, rejoicing in vision. Multifocals are, apprently, a bugger. Fortunately the amazing optometrist lady was able to bend the arms into a shape which no longer hurts, so we are now good to go, but really either I've been incredibly lucky with prescriptions for my entire life, or this particular one was jinxed. Probably both.

I have been not really posting because the last two weeks have been ungodly and horrible, I worked a 14 hour day last Sunday trying to finish up late reg submissions, I have never seen students so disorganised. On top of the blissful student disregard of deadlines, the already excessive challenges of remote reg in two weeks shorter than we had last year, were sharply exacerbated by, yup, yet again, campus closing down for student protests. About fees, again. I am, however, pleased to report that campus being blockaged and closed down, and lectures being interrupted by an SRC hellbent on preventing the academic year from continuing while any student was denied registration because of fee debt, is a lot less stressful when one is working remotely. Also, technology helps: while the protesters tried to disrupt live online lectures (by singing, in at least one case), a quick round of academics swapping tips on Mute All quickly settled the hash of that particular outbreak.

Now it's all gone suspiciously quiet, awaiting, I think, the Council meeting tonight which will decide if some, or all, of the fee blocked students will actually be allowed to register. If no, all hell will probably break loose with further blockades and protests. If yes, all hell will break loose as we suddenly have to register nearly two hundred additional students two weeks into term, using an exhausted advisor cohort, in as short a time as possible, since we're already a week and a half into term. Yay.

This has probably been the most exhausting and difficult reg season I've ever experienced, the volume of email I've had to deal with, and the levels of bewilderment and disorganisation of students, have been unparallelled. The legacy, I think, of two years of remote learning, and a growing and horrible detachment from the processes of academia on all levels. Our systems were not designed for this, and have adapted only partially, reluctantly and inadequately.

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

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