So New Cat has been living in our master bathroom for a few days now. At the vet’s suggestion, we have expanded his range to the laundry room as of yesterday. He is about three years old, which is about what I figured, an unfixed male, which was obvious, and unchipped. As of yesterday he is flea, worm and ear mite free and we’ve confirmed that he does not have FIV or whatever the other disease they make sure to check cats for is.
He is a friendly soft cuddly boi. Technically we can’t call him our cat or get him fixed until fifteen days have passed since reporting that we found him, so we’ve got a bit more time on that. I suspect an unchipped and unfixed male that was wandering the neighborhood is almost certainly not someone’s cat, however, and he’ll be ours soon enough. He knows what a litterbox is, so he probably got dumped by somebody.
We are having a hell of a time picking out a name. On one hand, this maybe isn’t a bad thing, as he’s not our cat yet and it’s always possible his owners might claim him, and renaming him before he’s official is putting the cart before the horse just a bit. On the other hand … it’s just not that damn likely. We may as well.
Possible options include:
Gus, which was my brother’s initial choice and seems to fit him. However, my wife has bad associations with a cat named Gus in the past (don’t ask) and so this is highly unlikely to be the final name.
Walter. He is a dignified-looking cat, and I feel like Walter sort of fits him.
Chewie. If I had been able to create a new cat out of thin air he would have been an orange boycat and we would have named him Goose; I feel like Chewie is too Captain Marvel-adjacent (Chewie is the name of the flerken in the comics that became Goose in the movie) to name this cat when the appearance of a Goose in the future is still possible.
Mochi. The Great Old One is literally from Japan and is named Mizu, which I have always suspected was supposed to be Miso but spelled wrong by the people at the shelter I got her from. I had a cat named Moro who passed away several years ago who was named after a character in Princess Mononoke, and our current kitten is named Sushi, which was my son’s decision. So we have a previously-established pattern of naming cats with 1) Japanese names starting with M and 2) Japanese foods. Which is a weird accident, because otherwise I display no weeaboo tendencies. Mochi fits both.
I have mostly been calling him “Big boy” or “Buddy,” and honestly I think “Buddy” works pretty well as a name for him but my wife calls our son that all the time and I’d rather not get that mixed up. I don’t like “Big boy” as an actual name but as a temporary nickname it works.
So far, I think Mochi is probably my favorite choice, but nothing has stuck yet. Suggestions?
This week was seven hundred years long and featured hospitals and shingles— the disease, not the roof covering–, neither of which I was directly involved in, but I’m tired and utterly refuse to brain in any significant capacity right now. Luckily I have massive megacorporations providing entertainment to soothe me. So: two brief mini-reviews.
I have watched both episodes of The Mandalorian that have been released, and it’s pretty solid. It’s definitely Star Wars– the series not feeling right was my second biggest fear behind the fact that it was going to secretly be about Boba Fett, which it isn’t– and while I wasn’t sold on the music or the humor after the first episode I was right in suspecting that I just needed to get used to it. My favorite thing about the show so far is that it subtly reinforces the idea that Mandalorians aren’t actually the big tough badasses that Star Wars have been pretending they are for years– Boba Fett got killed by a blind man with a stick and a monster that couldn’t move, and the Mandalorian (who still doesn’t have a name) gets his ass kicked by Jawas in the second episode. I mean, it’s hilarious, but still. I don’t know that this is worth getting Disney+ for all by itself, but if you’re a Star Wars sort of person you probably already have your subscription and have watched the show already.
I have beaten this now, and everything I said in my early impressions post still holds: this is basically a Fallout game, only more Westerny and less post-apocalyptic, and with Mass Effect/Dragon Age-style companions. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll get along with it perfectly well, and unlike the last Dragon Age game I was actually able to finish it without dying of boredom, but I’m starting to think that unless someone does something to radically shake up how this genre works I think I’m going to tap out of it now, because long quest chains and ceaseless fetch quests just aren’t fun for me anymore. I damn near turned the game off when one character literally asked me to go ask another character if a poster he’d ordered had arrived yet, and I accidentally screwed up a quest late in the game involving modeling for an NPC and when I looked up what might have happened had I not messed it up I realized that there were 10,000 more things to do for it and I’d have been howling and throwing shit at the walls by the end of it. It’s mostly well-written and entertaining beyond that, but this game demands a bit more patience than I actually have available to me right now. I might go through it once more to see how some quests might go when I make different choices, but it won’t be happening for a while.
Back in February I was able to get my hands on an early copy of Howard Andrew Jones’ For the Killing of Kings. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and said so, as I’ve been known to do, andmiraculously just recently ended up with an early copy of the second book in the trilogy, called Upon the Flight of the Queen. I finished it today, a few days before release– the book comes out on November 19, next week.
I’ve been a fan of Jones’ for a while; he basically writes modern sword-and-sorcery, which is a genre that’s directly up my alley. The Ring-Sworn books are a bit more European in tone than the previous books I’ve read by him, and the first one basically ended up being a sort of fantasy murder mystery for about the first 2/3 of it, only the setup was that most of the characters were pursuing the rest of them for the murder that the book started with, while the main protagonists were looking for the shadowy villains who were actually responsible for the killing.
Upon the Flight of the Queen is, unapologetically and directly, a fantasy war novel. Killing of Kings ends with an invasion, and the entirety of Queen bounces back and forth between several locations all simultaneously being invaded by a group called the Na’or, who are 1) generally not very nice, 2) have dragons, and 3) are sort of allied with the Queen, whose role in the story I’m not going to talk about all that much because spoilers and I’ve probably already said enough, although if you’ve read the first book you’re already aware that something not quite kosher is going on with her.
The strengths of the first book were the characters and the fact that Jones never stopped stepping on the gas for basically the entire length of the story. This is much the same, really, except that the book’s timeline is really compressed compared to the first book– it takes place over no more than a couple of weeks, at most, I think, and there’s absolutely no point where the author lets the momentum of the book flag at all. Now, one mistake I think I made: I’ve read, conservatively, probably 75-80 books since Killing of Kings, and it might have been smarter of me to have reread it before jumping back into the sequel. There are a lot of characters and a lot going on in this book, and I spent a bit more time trying to figure out what was going on than I generally like to, which I think is more my fault as a reader rather than the fault of the book– which is, after all, book two of a trilogy, which one might not reasonably expect to stand on its own all that well. I also could have benefited from a map. Fantasy books should always have maps, even if they don’t need them. This one involves war and invasions so it needs them.
The first two books in the Ring-Sworn trilogy came out ten months apart, so one assumes Volume 3 will be out sometime next year. I didn’t love this one quite as much as I did the first volume, but I’ll make sure to reread them before the third book comes out. If you enjoyed For the Killing of Kings, I’d go hunt Upon the Flight of the Queen when it comes out next week.
Yes goddammit of course I have a Disney+ subscription. I may actually have already mentioned ponying up around here; I signed up a few weeks ago and have been waiting impatiently ever since for the damn thing to actually launch. The entertaining bit is that after those several weeks of impatience I actually forgot until an hour or so ago that the thing was launching today, and didn’t get everything signed in and hooked up until just before dinner.
What am I watching first? Captain Marvel, of course, but we will absolutely be watching the first episode of The Mandalorian before bed, especially now that I have confirmed that a certain thing I was worried about does not actually happen in the show. (No spoilers, of course.)
We spent a couple of minutes scrolling through the available offerings and my wife went entertainingly nuts over some of the possibilities, so I think our $6.99 for at least the first month or two are going to be pretty well-spent. For me, the Star Wars and Marvel content is gonna be more than enough to keep me busy for a while, and having all the classic Disney films, many of which my son hasn’t seen, is icing on the cake.
So it turns out that if you buy an iPhone nowadays you get a free year’s subscription to Apple TV+, a service I’m not fully certain that I knew existed until discovering that I had a free year’s subscription to it. And it also turns out that if your brother and sister-in-law are spending the night at your house and the boy has been put to bed and you stare at each other long enough, you’ll end up watching that new Jason Momoa show that all of you have vaguely heard of but nobody really knows anything about. Because Jason Momoa is really, really pretty, and it doesn’t matter much what he’s actually in so long as you get to look at him while he’s in it.
(Jason Momoa is one of a very small number of exceptions to my otherwise lifelong heterosexuality. He’s my goddamn imaginary boyfriend and I dare any of you to make a thing out of it.)
Here are some good things about See, which has had four episodes released, and which I have watched two episodes of:
It is well-acted. Not only is Jason Momoa in it, but another main character is played by Alfre Woodard, who I would watch reading a phone book. All of the characters are compelling and interesting.
It is absolutely god damned gorgeous to watch. Lay aside my Momoasexuality; I don’t know where this show is filmed, but I want to live there, and the people who designed the sets and found the locations deserve whatever the highest awards in their fields are, preferably more than once. This is one of the most beautifully-shot TV series I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know what the budget is for it but I suspect it’s an awful lot.
It is well-directed across the board and when it wants to be it is wonderfully spooky. A character called the Shadow is introduced in the second episode and the way the Shadow moves and is filmed is a fucking masterclass in creating suspense out of basically nothing at all; she literally just walks around or stands in a corner and she’s the creepiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
Here is the less good thing about See:
It may have the single most ludicrous premise of any entertainment product I’ve ever encountered, and I am the person whose review of Snowpiercer is literally the number one result on the Internet when you search for the words “Snowpiercer stupid” on Google. It is bone-shakingly, astonishingly, unbelievably, paralyzingly dumb on a huge number of levels, and the fact that it manages to be compelling enough that I’m probably going to watch at least another episode or two is a fucking miracle and a testament to the three items above.
Here’s the premise of the program, which is a distant future post-apocalyptic fantasy show: a virus wiped out all but two million people and blinded literally everyone who was left. All future descendants of those people were also born blind. Now, “centuries” (it doesn’t say how many) later, one man has been born with sight and impregnated a woman with twins, and the twins have also been born able to see.
The show is far enough in the future that there are no remnants of human society left– everything is broad expanses of wilderness, with no ruined buildings or rusted cars or anything like that, although we have seen one (1) pile of tires and there appear to be enough plastic water bottles left that a guy is able to make a point of using three a day to send messages down a river in a scheme that is so stupid that I refuse to describe it here. There is a dam left that appears to provide a small amount of hydroelectric power to the people who live near it, and there is at least one working record player and one copy of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day available on vinyl so that a lady can masturbate to it while she prays.
Yeah, that’s what I said. This woman is supposedly a queen and she “has to pray” twice in two episodes and both of them involve orgasms and one of them is juuuuust a little rapey. Where the show is not stupid it is absolutely batshit nuts. This is one of those places.
It is far enough in the future that the very concept of vision has been reduced to a heretical idea that nobody really believes in any longer, but clothes are still dyed and one weird religious thing features everybody in matching black robes and jesus my worldbuilding questions about clothing alone could take up another thousand words. Needless to say, while I’ve only watched two hours of programming and there is plenty of time to get deeper into worldbuilding later, these folks have no manufacturing, no agriculture, they cannot hunt because no one on Earth can convince me that a society of blind people can capture enough meat to stay alive, and their technology level appears to be firmly set right around Hollywood Viking, except with guide ropes stretched everywhere.
(Writing has evolved into a sort of Aztec quipu thing, with lots of knotted ropes that people “read” with their fingers, and the big religious ritual scene has huge knotted ropes hanging from the wall, which is a cool way to approach scripture, but there are no children anywhere other than the two infants, which makes me wonder about how education works.)
There is a big battle scene between Jason Momoa’s village and the “Witchfinders,” who introduce all sorts of questions on their own, and it’s fascinatingly shot but if you’re already wondering how you tell who is on your side when you’re at war and everyone is blind, you shouldn’t expect great things in the answer. There are also occasional little hints about some characters having what boil down to supernatural senses of hearing and smell, and possibly a touch of magic scattered here and there, but they haven’t gotten into that much.
Oh, and Jason Momoa kills a bear. Just before he kills the bear he is carrying two babies around with him on a tray. That’s not a joke or an exaggeration. He drops the tray when the bear attacks him, but the babies are still on the tray when he finds them again after the bear gets killed.
So, like, if you happen to have Apple TV+, which I suspect not many of you do, I think you should watch this, because I want to have some people I can talk to about it, but get a beer and some popcorn first and be prepared to mock the hell out of it when you’re not in awe at the scenery or the direction. I’m committed to watching the four episodes that are out now, and we’ll see how long I stick to it once episodes are weekly.
This … hasn’t been a bad week, exactly? I mean, Monday was kinda rough, but other than that things have gone pretty smooth, and even somewhat positively? But this is like the third day in a row that I was somehow convinced just absolutely had to be Friday, and yet somehow none of them have been Friday so far, and now that Friday is supposedly actually tomorrow I’m not at all convinced that it’s really going to happen.
In other news, this is how Pete Buttigieg eats a cinnamon roll:
And, like, I already went through the weird soul-searching why the hell does it matter to me that Pete Buttigieg doesn’t eat cinnamon rolls right thing on Twitter, followed immediately by why do I live in a world where this is something I even have to know about, followed by what is life, but fuck it the picture’s funny and the dude is still my mayor for another couple of months (Pete’s dweeby little handpicked successor won, roughly 63-37, I believe) so I still get to make fun of him if I want.
I’m tired, dammit, and I still have a big pile of grading to do tonight. So it’s absolutely time to play video games now.
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