Stupid Cat

Had me worried to death.

It turns out that she went behind the couch, and there’s a small recess, almost like a shelf, that a kitten could climb up on. I found her when I got the totally stupid idea of wanting to turn the couch upside down.

That’s it, I’m putting her on a leash…

The current plan is to just keep her around and wait the two weeks until she’s old enough to get her first set of inoculations. In the meantime, she’s up for adoption. If no one wants her, and it won’t make Zero a permanent prisoner of the Cave, we might keep her. In the meantime, check her out.

Suspension Of The Search

We’re looking for Orphan, but I’m giving it a half hour before we go rooting around for her again.

First, all the other stuff.

Add Another Virtual Pink Slip To The Wall

The Open Space Anthology guys got back to me, and for whatever reason, they decided not to go with it. No definitive answers on it, they just said it didn’t make the final cut. Sigh… oh well… the struggle continues…

This Rocks, This Sucks, I Got This For Free And I Still Want My Money Back

Reviewing games is cool.

Although so far the game that I’ve enjoyed playing most so far is Halo, which isn’t actually a game I had to review, just one I wanted to play. The plot was like an incredibly slick action/SF novel, or the kind of thing that James Cameron did when he was still cool and not doing historical dramas. Those Bungie guys are incredibly deep and detailed in their writing. Everything has significance, right down to the real name of the hero (John-117) being a quote from the Bible relating to floods and armageddons. Fatal Frame was a blast to play, and is still the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, but I think ultimately, Silent Hill still wins out in overall complexity and gameplay. Fatal Frame does have the atmosphere, but the story gets kind of sentimental and schlocky towards the end…

The comic book reviews are nearly done. Just three more to go, but for the most part, they can all be positively reccommended in one way or another, the weakest reason being nostalgia in the case of the G.I. Joe reprints…

You’ve Gotta’ Be KIDDING Me…

So as usual, I get a call from nowhere, and some woman on the other end is asking if I’d be interested in being a researcher for the next four to five weeks on the Singapore episode of Lonely Planet. I went down yesterday for a meeting with the woman in question and I’m not the only one who’s up for the job, so I guess I’ll find out Friday whether or not they want to use me. Still, it would pay the rent…

Put That Kitten’s Photo On The Milk Cartons

Which leads us to Orphan.

The story behind this is about three or four days ago, while walking towards the grocers to make another supply run, I heard a pathetic mewing coming from a bunch of concrete I-beam thingys that are sitting on the roadside as some construction work is being done on the canal behind our apartment, which is now being covered over and turned into a sidewalk. Checking it out revealed that we had a new addition to the usual roster of cats that seem to dominate the neighborhood, a teeny, tiny, incredibly cute kitten. I just assumed that it’s mom was somewhere, because we heard another kitten mewing somewhere off in the distance.

However, since making regular runs over the last few days for more groceries, cigarettes, or just to get something to eat, that same kitten has been stuck in the same pile of I-beams, mewing and hiding from everyone and everything. One night I actually managed to coax it out, and since then, it’s always slowly come crawling out and let me manhandle it.

After a few days it became evident that either the kitten was abandoned as a result of A) The mom vacating the area for whatever reason and leaving her, B) The mom getting killed, or C) someone’s cat had kittens and so they just dumped the kittens out here. I started to realize that the kitten probably hadn’t eaten anything, and maybe had been drinking rain water. Food was definitely not likely, because the hierarchy of neighborhood cats would have prevented it from getting anywhere near the food that the old Chinese lady likes to drop around the neighborhood at night. There’s already one youngish cat we’ve dubbed “Stinky” that is constantly getting shafted by the bigger cats in the neighborhood. We see him sitting on the outer edge of the circle when they go at the rice or whatever leftover is brought to them that night. Whenever he makes an attempt at trying to get a morsel, he gets run out. A little kitten wouldn’t have a chance with that crowd.

So today, we took pity on it.

I went out, found the kitten (Hereafter dubbed “Orphan” ’cause when the girlfriend asked me what I’d call it if we were ever stupid enough to bring it home, I immediately said that…) it clambered out, I grabbed it and carried it back to the apartment and man did it ever raise a high pitched ruckus. We fed it and it immediately fell on the food and water and it was actually trembling as it ate, which more or less confirmed my fear that it was on the verge of starvation. We have also realized that Zero has a greater terror of the kitten than the kitten could have of Zero’s hissing. One meow from Orphan sent Zero scurrying off to the Cave, where he’s spent the entire evening sulking. After that we brought it down to the vet to get it checked out and found out she’s probably only two or three weeks old. Not even old enough for her first immunization. Which, unfortunately is a requirement for bringing a cat into the Cat Welfare/Adoption Society. So we figured we’d hold onto her for the week or two until she can get her shots, and then drop her off. Unless we get too attached and decide to keep her. She’s pretty attached to us anyway. The girlfriend’s theory is that since I’m the first actual entity of any sort to show her any kind of kindness, Orphan has basically imprinted herself on me, and that’s why she follows me around, and falls asleep in my lap.

With that goal firmly in mind, we brought her home, gave her her first bath (She put up far less resistance than Zero, but then she’s also unbelievabley weak compared to a full grown, mad with panic cat) fed her some more, she eased our paranoia about whether or not she’d know what to do with a litter box by using one properly, and we took a few pictures of her, so that the welfare people could post it on the ‘net. Then we turned our backs for a few minutes to check out the pictures on the computer, and Orphan, who was last seen traipsing around near the coffee table, promptly vanished and hasn’t been seen since.

It’s kind of eerie, ’cause up till now, she’s been an unbelievably vocal cat, never seeming able to shut up for more than a minute, but she’s been disturbingly silent. So either she’s teleported (Not too likely, but can’t be ruled out), has fallen into her first restful sleep since birth, has eaten something bad for her and crawled off to quietly die somewhere and we’ll only find out where she is when we can pinpoint the stink of death in the apartment, or somehow found some kind of squirrerl hole that we were previously unaware of and is no longer in the apartment. Again, really, REALLY odd. Up till now Orphan has diligently followed us where ever we go.

This is, to say the least, a been a really weird night.

Oh well, back to the search…

I sure hope she’s not dead or anything. It would utterly suck, and I don’t relish the thought of a dead cat squirreled away somewhere in my home…

Positive Potential

That describes the reaction I got when I sent off the latest Jen story, now called Suffer The Little Children, and got an immediate response from the Open Space anthology guys. The e-mail, in its entirety, reads thusly:

Hi Wayne–

This one’s pretty good. I’m going to keep it in my “maybe” pile, and I’ll get back to you within a few days, once I’ve made my final selection for the book.

So I got a definite, confirmed, “maybe”.

Better than nothing, I guess…

The Bill-Box

My free Bill-Box is now sitting on the floor. I got a bunch of games for it, Project Gotham (Racing, just okay), Medal of Honor: Frontline (WWII first person shooter, storm Omaha beach just like Granddad did!), Halo (THE best FPS made to date, rips off Aliens military hardware design and that’s a good thing…) and Fatal Frame, which gets my vote as the scariest game ever made. Of those games, it was only Frame that, in the end, needed to be reviewed, but my God, this game is so disturbing that sometimes I don’t even want to play it. It’s WAY too stressful. I’ve already sent off my review, which was glowing in its reccomendation, but I may have finally found a game that’s TOO scary to play. I can’t, in good conscience, reccomend this game to kids, because for a small child, this game could permanently traumatize them in the same way that watching Poltergeist as a kid traumatized me…

The Bill-Box is ugly. And the controls bug me, they’re to big and unwieldly and nowhere near as intuitive as the Playstation controls. I’m also annoyed that when I got it, all the language settings were intially Chinese and I even had to call up the Microsoft technical help hotline to figure out how to get Halo back to English again. I admit it, I don’t like the Bill-Box, and I especially don’t like the man behind it, but it IS free, and it is technically the most powerful system around at the moment. I can’t wait for that to change in 2005 with the next generation of systems, because it bothers me that Bill wouldn’t leave the console arena alone. Man, isn’t world domination enough for you? Why’d you have to go after games too?

Of late I have been getting a lot of flack for not liking the X-Box, and have been told that Bill Gates is a genius and that the only people who don’t like him are those are weak and have no respect for his hard work and power, and that hey, he produces great games, and in the end, it’s the consumers who win.

My only response to such arguments is that I’m sure the gays, Catholics and Polish pretty much thought the same thing when Hitler was being nice them and was only going after the Jews. As long he’s treating us nice, who cares what he does elsewhere? Those Jews were just weak and jealous of Hitler’s power anyway, they deserved to be crushed.

I am going to assume that such theories only hold water as long as those who say them aren’t victims of Microsoft. The absolute second they or their loved ones somehow get their lives damaged and impaired as a result of Microsoft’s bullying, it’ll be different and Microsoft will be evil because now, God forbid, it’s actually happening to THEM. But then I forget sometimes this island isn’t about right and wrong, it’s about reward and punishment. As long as Microsoft is nice to you, let them do what they want to others…

Sigh…

These people will never learn, will they? Not until it’s too late, anyway…