Posts made by Packrat

Artemis and the Sock Drawer.

I see something lurking in the cupboard

Something fuzzy

She pops out to say hi

I have spent an awful lot of time on trains today, travelling about two hundred miles to attend a job interview, now I am on the way back.

As such I am going to be exhausted by the time I get home at 10pm or so but as I was leaving the building where I was interviewed? I had a call from the director who interviewed me saying how he felt it had gone really well, it was a pleasure to meet me and he wanted to arrange for a call with myself and his own boss ASAP.

So I am pretty sure that I am going to get a verbal offer for the job of Senior Export Control Manager for Europe tomorrow evening, for a company employing 8,000 people. I am thirty five and six years ago I was severely depressed in a shitty admin role with no degree and what I thought were minimal prospects.

So thank you SSRI medication. You really fucking work.

Restaurants that give tiny, tiny servings.

Today was actually a pretty good day, I took it off work because I was interviewing for another job, was up bright and early, petted the excited zooming kittens then read the latest John Scalzi book for a few hours on the train. I got to the interview in good time, it went really well, then I decided to grab lunch in a decent looking place before heading home.

If I order pulled pork and fries for (translates) $25 I want more than a tiny bun thing of pork and like, fifteen fries. It is not as if I was in London, I was in a small city in the north where things are normally super cheap.

Today, Artemis manages to nudge a tiny gap open in the kickboard of my fitted kitchen. She then flowed through the resulting tiny gap before getting completely stuck, I wondered where she was then found myself hearing despairing mews from behind the backs of cupboards.

Once I realized where she had gotten to I removed paneling to let her out but of course her sister then had to investigate the exciting new territory, her hugely fluffy long haired sister. By the time I had both of them lured out I found myself with a pair of extremely dusty and excited 8 month old kittens romping around.

Gah.

Edit: She did it again today, it turns out it was not the kickboard, she was climbing atop the fridge then falling down behind it. I had to unscrew a ventilation grill to let her out after I heard piteous cries then saw her nose through it. I have covered the top with cardboard but will need to work out a less airflow blocking solution.

Hera has very floofy little paws. Also she Judges you.

I took advantage of the recent sale to buy Banner Saga 2 and 3, having enjoyed the original but then failed to follow up on it.

I guess I am going to be engaging in tactical RPG saga action for a while.

Another option could be charging the AP to the person being healed, on the basis that they are straining themselves by pushing on when they really should not, damaging their body and needing more 'time off' to recover after the adventure is over?

One piece of advise regarding magical items that boost stats.

Please resist the temptation to have items that boost a stat but do so 'secretly' so that 'nobody can work it out'.

I can guarantee that if you make a ring (or a nipple ring) that gives +1 Luck but does not announce this then that mostly means that its secret powers will only be unlocked by assholes who are willing to equip items then +roll three hundred times in their bedroom before loading the results into a spreadsheet and comparing to the unassisted statistics.

It would probably result in a subset or clique of players who do that kind of thing and fairly rapidly know the precise stats of every magical item they retrieve whilst other people flail blindly and feel useless.

This is probably very much a case of 1st world problems.

But no, if you phone me on a Tuesday afternoon I cannot make time for a job interview on Thursday the same week. I have an existing job and most of why you are potentially interested in hiring me is because of this and its fairly high profile, intensive nature!

I would suggest a combination of:

1. It needing some kind of legitimate case. You cannot just challenge Lord Bob then take all of Lord Bob's stuff, first you need some kind of claim on Lord Bob's stuff (he inherited it from my uncle who actually disinherited him and left it to me! Or I just divorced Lord Bob and he has refused to give me back my dowry! I claim that he pinky promised me that he would give me all of his stuff if my horse won the race and the high priestess who officiates this stuff has been bribed to agree with me! etc). Basically you cannot just challenge it yourself, you need to get the go ahead from some kind of spiritual or temporal authority who basically deems you to 'have a case' and allow the official duel.

2. Champions. If you are the challenged party then you can hire somebody else to fight for you, perhaps along with if this option is taken also allowing the challenger to use a champion if the defender does. The champions should probably be facing something pretty serious to ensure this is still a big deal. Maybe death or maiming in the fight if they are dangerous enough, or something added like 'the loser gets poisoned/cursed/whatever and loses their magical powers for three months! Or has some manner of mild banishment perhaps. Something so that you do not have The Strongest always just backing up their friends and fighting for them.

The new Crusader Kings 2 expansion continues to be mad. Here is my previous ruler over a decade prior to her death, an elderly dragon queen of a tribal society in sub Saharan Africa who, by the time she finally passed away, personally killed over a hundred people in duels or battle.

She also founded a legendary bloodline by going on an expedition to Russia then fighting a series of bad asses to the death because she had run out of worthy foes closer to home, now all of her female line descendants get special bonuses. Unfortunately both of her badass daughters died before she did and her granddaughters were significantly less impressive. Also she became celibate in her 30s having only had three kids. (This did not remove her Lustful trait?).

She was sufficiently murdertastic that her retinue could attack armies outnumbering it then literally kill everyone whilst suffering minimal losses, she also helped out a lot by personally slaughtering enemy commanders in a good proportion of battles.

@saturna Well that is remarkably creepy! Literally a cat's eye view.

Poor Hera looks particularly silly in the wake of being splayed. She has also turned into an utterly demanding cuddle monster who will not let me sleep? But the purr cuddles are adorable. Here she is just sort of hanging out next to me.

So the new mega expansion/DLC for Crusader Kings 2? All sorts of new options a lot of which are not super obvious. For example if you play a custom world you can modify religions and one of the options allows you to have a society that is matrilineal rather than patrilineal.

Also there is a semi hidden options for 'animal kingdoms'. Want to play as a dragon duchess and eat your prisoners, using your sons (who are eggs until maturity) as political bargaining chips whilst your daughters lead armies? This is now apparently a thing.

Artemis continues to decide that perching atop doors is the best thing ever. It allows her to peer.

So one the smaller of my two kittens has decided to become a shoulder cat. If I pick her up? She immediately climbs onto my shoulder so that she can be super tall.

But today? She used this elevated vantage point to then leap atop an open door. She did not apparently have any plan for how to get down:

@jaded I admit to not being that impressed by the opening pitch of their video that the age of party based RPGs is an ancient and forgotten time of glory.

A fair few good party based RPGs have come out over the past few years and a lot of the old ones were dreadful!

Well thanks to work forcing me to cancel the arranged appointment for splaying? Now one of my kittens has gone into heat. She is wandering around being extremely squeaky and wanting mega head rubs as well as behaving as if my armpits are laced with catnip. Amusing but also sufficient to ensure cats are banished from the bedroom overnight if I want any semblance of sleep.

I definitely ran into the 'perils of volunteering' at work recently. Now I am supposed to volunteer and drive stuff, part of my job is to be proactive. But that then makes things my fault.

The situation: Company has a steadily growing profusion of different licences from the government allowing us to share technology with an overseas site. This site employs over 500 engineering staff and they are collaborating with about a thousand more locally.

I go 'Hey, this is getting really complex. Would it help if I consolidated everything into one big licence so that people did not have to remember which one to quote and record against?' A great idea! I got the go ahead, applied for it months ago, now long overdue with the government and remaining so.

Once this becomes obvious (I had given enough time if the government had stuck to their target processing times and attempted to give months more but people took a long time to confirm what they in fact wanted) I flag it up to seniors and apply for another licence to cover one of the existing ones that is due to expire and would leave hundreds of people unable to work.

Of course this one (the backup!) also goes overdue because the government is super busy (with Brexit amongst other things). Now it is my fault that 1,500 people were potentially going to have to stop working and goes down as a black mark against me even when I put together a plan to resolve it with minimal impact and finally, just, get the licence in time.

None of this was ever my responsibility to begin with

To belatedly join in the black cat train, enjoy this majestically floofy tail.