So it goes

Been a bit busy on the whole. Let's see.

Friday saw the continuation of the Cardiff-based supernatural investigative roleplaying game. I'm not convinced that I'm following the right approach but we're slowly gathering more information as well as dispatching an occasional shapeshifting baddie. Watch this space.

On Saturday we popped off to a RAT SHOW. It was hosted by the National Fancy Rat Society (NFRS) and took place in a nice little church in Miskin. As you might imagine, there were lots of lovely rats and also very nice cakes. The cakes and rats were kept well apart.

We picked up a couple of new hammocks and things from the stalls - one from The Rat Warehouse and some being sold by the (NFRS). The show is essentially a Crufts-style affair where rats are brought in and judged according to varieties, based on the 'standards' as well as condition, vitality, curiosity, etc. They also have a 'pets' section for rats which, while excellent, don't adhere strictly to the standards. The winner of this was a beautiful rex with great fur and curly whiskers. He didn't qualify for the main show due to some little patches of missing fur but he was ace anyway. There were also competitions that tested them for curiosity and also an obstacle course.

The main thing though was that we collected a pair of genuine proper breeder rats that we'd ordered from Bongo Fury rattery. Behold Bongo Fury Awkward Customer:

And Bongo Fury No More Mr Nice Guy:

The difference between these and pet shop rats is hard to overestimate. They are boundlessly friendly, curious and energetic. Their friendliness even extends to preferring to sniff at and grab me, rather than the food I'm offering. Ignoring food in favour of me is utterly unprecedented in my experience of rats.

Although they are great and doing fantasticly, BF Awkward Customer has a head tilt which you can just about see here:

Can you see the way he's leaning over to his left a bit? I've talked about these a bit before as one of our girls (Sansa) has one too. It's caused by an inner ear infection and leaves them with a sort of crick neck and balance problems. It doesn't seem to bother him in the slightest but he does have a bit of a tendancy to roll over and needs quite careful handling as we can't rely on him to hold on to us as well as rats normally would. When putting him back in the cage he also has a habit of trying to climb in upside down - ie; he'll grab the top of the door and trying to climb upwards. Still, he's perfectly happy and holds his own when BF No More Mr Nice Guy is scrapping with him. That happens a lot.

On Sunday I had my first session of a photography course down in Chapter Arts Centre. This is 'Advanced Digital Photography' and so focuses more on digital editing and manipulation which are skills which I only learned from buggering about with Photoshop so I don't really know what I'm doing. Formal training will be great. Was an enjoyable first session and is producing some astounding artwork:

For part of the session we walked around a sciencey photo exhibition that was on there. Gave me a few ideas and was really nicely done. Some of the bits of science clunked slightly but I wasn't sure if that was a deliberate nod, a sort of acknowledgement of the fakery involved. Still. Got lots to do for the next session.

On Monday we started a new roleplaying game written by one of the people we normally play with. It's about Zombies and I believe it was called Zombies. It's set in the real world with you effectively playing yourself and roleplaying your own responses to an ongoing zombie apocalypse. It uses Google Maps for street view for navigation - with any people you come across in the photos actually being zombies. At the moment we're just trying to sweep a village and establish a sort of beachhead for taking the country back.

As you can see above, the front garden is doing well. That's a flower. Only slight problem is that the weather has forbidden me from trying to deal with the weeds at the moment and I think the weeds are thriving under the new clear garden regime. This will not be tolerated and I hope to deal with them this weekend.

Not been getting that much gaming done. Tried a bit of Dungeon Defenders but I just don't get along with it. I think the interface is a bit too consoley. Mass Effect 3 is slow going but I fear I'm having trouble getting into it. It's a bit too big for me and there's so much going on that I can't keep track now. I will persist but it's a bit overwhelming.

I've been doing some more Welsh study, largely by going through sheets and sheets of work and translating them into English. Gotten a lot more confidence with it now.

Yesterday I discovered that Cardiff Market doesn't appear to have a nut vendor. I wanted them because I'm going for a new paradigm of rat feeding after reading rat nutrition guide, 'The Scuttling Gourmet'. ENRICHMENT:

The basic idea is to feed in such a way that enriches their experience of their environment, gives them interesting things to do and lets them express ratty behaviour such as foraging and destroying bloody everything. Most of what I've done comes from ideas from The Scuttling Gourmet. Above is an initial experiment with a colander which is suspended and filled with food and paper. It moves around slightly and the rats have to dig and burrow to get at the food as well as having a tricky climb in. It's not wholly successful as I couldn't position it just right as there were rats everywhere while I was tying it in..

Experiments with the others have included scattering food around so it gets buried in the shredded cardboard and has to be found, stuffing a tissue box with bits of food so they have to dig through the tissues to find things, putting a whole potted herb in the cage, and filling up and closing egg boxes. This last one was successful with the two new boys but the older ones just ripped it open in a matter of minutes. Next time I'll probably tie it closed so they have to either destroy the skin or gnaw through the box to get anything.

Nuts in shells are also a good one as they have to work hard to break into them. Sadly, finding nuts with shells is proving impossible, but I'll get some soon. This sentence represents a callback to the beginning of this section.

As usual, other stuff too but I can't be expected to cover *everything*.

Multimedia

I think I may have reached the end game with Lil Kingdom. I now have Ogres and a Unicorn;

The unicorn allows you to immediately get the full silver value of all of the stuff in a floor of your dungeon without it being lost. Last time I did this I got enough silver in one go for about six new floors. But there's nothing else good to do with them, other than just generating more silver for more floors. I appreciate the cunning addictiveness of the design and the artistry of the game but I reckon I've had enough.

Another game I've been playing a bit of is Cut the Rope. In this you have a piece of 'candy' on a set of strings suspended over a little monster named Om Nom:

He doesn't like to move to eat so you have to cut the ropes with a swipe to get the candy to swing into his mouth. Extra challenge is added by trying to make it swing so it also intersects with stars for bonus points. Good puzzles.

Jelly Defense is a fairly standard Tower Defense game but with a nice art style and some interesting mechanics:

In essence you have to build towers to kill wave after wave of jelly monsters of different types, so it's all about strategic placement and use of resources. There's also the fact that red towers only kill red jellies, blue kill blue and there's some mixed ones too. Some of the interface is slightly clunky - I often find my finger is in the way of something I need to see - but nothing too vital.

Wind-up Knight is a very pretty racing platformer thing. Not much to say other than it being fun but that it locked my phone up.

Listening to audiobooks continues regularly. At present it is Company of Liars:

This is about a group of traders, musicians, etc, trying to escape the bubonic plague. It's very nicely done and has lovely turns of phrase - "They giggled, delighted by terror" and "As the yawns multiplied around the group" - and some interesting history. Lots of stuff about religious and political persecution of the Jews and other minority groups, some bits about Venetian glassblowers being banished to an island in case they gave their secrets away and all sorts. It's interesting to see the sorts of scapegoating going on - blaming the Jewish population for the bubonic plague, rather than having to accept their own powerlessness. Some of the characters are despicable but most of them are compelling and the book is read wonderfully by David Thorpe.

A physical book I've been reading has been Mouse Guard. It's a graphic novel about the hidden society of mice, hunted by just about everything and protected and guided by the titular Mouse Guard. It features a dual-wielding dagger mouse named Sadie:

That is probably all you need to know to rush out and buy it.

We had a bit more rat sickness. Arya is doing fine after her antibiotics but Nightcrawler has since needed some. Furthermore, Fran noticed a lump on Sansa's neck on Wednesday, prompting us to go to the vet's last night. Sansa remains impossible to handle so the vet wasn't able to diagnose exactly so we just booked in for an operation next Tuesday. We took some antibiotics home and mixed them with some apricot jam to get them to take them. This necessitated keeping Sansa in her own cage for the time being so she actually eats the dose we want her to have.

Upon getting up this morning and examining her, the lump is gone! There's some crusty skin around it so it looks like she burst it. No sign of any pus or blood either. It had been bothering her and she was scratching it a lot so she must have dealt with it herself. Clever girl! Chased her around with some antiseptic to make sure it doesn't get infected but with minimal success. She can stay on her own for a little bit as it might do her good.

High Technology

Finally my life is complete. Not only do I have a usb stick on a keyring, but it also has a badger on it.

You may also note that the accompanying PC has a Zip250 drive. These were once considered the pinnacle of mobile file storage but now they are sweetly quaint. In this particular case it is also broken. Still, it covers what would otherwise by a hole in my pc case.

Speaking of high tech gizmos I've been doing a bit of Android gaming. Although most games on Android are unbearable crap, the sort of thing to make you despair and weep and gnash your teeth, there are some good ones. I have been playing Lil Kingdom:

In which you make a castle but burrowing down into the ground. The residents are also a thoughtful and cultured lot:

Basically you earn coins for building floors, stocking the floors with goods to sell and for doing quests. It's quite perfectly crafted to be addictive and manipulative but I really like the art style. My obsession with it has gone off the boil a bit now but I'm still dipping in.

Still carrying on with Mass Effect. Prompted by Fish Tank Girl (http://fishtankgirl.blogspot.co.uk/) I discovered that there is a memorial wall in my ship's crew quarters. It's.. running low on space:

Otherwise I've been carrying on, doing my best to avoid a diplomatic mission. Let's see.. Oh, you may want to meet my new doctor:

She's the previously-mentioned French hippy. I can't realistically have the same confidence in her that I had in Chakwas - she simply doesn't have the authority. Still, I wasn't exactly innundated with volunteers and ship must have doc. I also have a new comms offiicer who is a cockney.

Some other old faces have turned up. Had a mission with Jack, she seems to be taking to being a teacher. And when I went to visit Kaiden in hospital I ran into:

Thane! He is handling his sickness stoicly. I wish there was more I could do to help.

Following the diplomatic mission I ran into this delight:

Mordin! He slipped me some information regarding the.. the Genophage suffering people. The name of the species totally escapes me for now. I ended up in his lab after firmly defending the rights of the aforementioned species and am aiming to cure the Genophage once and for all. The Sularian ambassador called me a bully for shouting at him :(

Expected Allies

After running around various shops, searching for 'storage solutions' to bundle up things in the house that are no longer particularly needed, we popped to McDonalds. There was an amusing entitled-princess woman in there who loudly announced, "I am NOT sitting on a dirty table" before proceeding to do so. The food then somehow made me feel ill, despite just being beef, bread and potato. Mysterious.

After that I made some boiled eggs for the rats and did some Mass Effect 3. First proper mission - rescuing a Primark. Turns out that it's actually *Primarch* - some sort of bloke rather than a clothing shop. Who knew? Here he is, brooding over his burning planet:

At least, I think that's him. Though actually, it may well be Garrus (MY EXPECTED ALLY) looking at his hometown burning up a bit.

Managed to get out, got myself a new sniper rifle. I'm a ohh.. what's it called? The cloaky sniper class.. Inflitrator? Anyway, I'm one of those this time. Fancied a change from being an Engineer. I do like sniping.

Here me, now.

The number of emails I have received asking when the next blog post will appear is literally uncountable. Here it is, at last.

First thing to notice, blogger has a totally new layout on its backend - it's all HTML fivey. Nice and all, but seems overengineered.

But back to business.

The weekend was mostly spent doing yet more tidying. I don't believe I even cooked anything. The house is now looking neat and tidy, for a given value of neat/tidy. Getting there though.

In rat news - we have two new 'uns. When out shopping we popped into Pets at Home - this is always a risk - to check their rescue section. Occasionally they have rats alone in the cages and it's just too sad to leave them. On this occasion there was a single male - he was fairly jittery and gave me a bit of a bite but we couldn't take him as we've got two new males coming to us soon anyway. They did, however, have two girls. After a quick intro we decided to grab them to accompany our current two girls. Here they be:

The silver is named 'Beneath a Steel Sky' and the black&white is 'Broken Sword'. Alternatively known as Steel/Sky/Sword. They are dumbo rats and Steel has a short tail, possibly as a result of some accident. They're getting along ok with us and are curious and pretty active. Sword is unscarable whilst Sky is a bit cautious. Slowly bringing them along and we plan to move them in with Arya and Sansa at the weekend. They've already met Arya as we got them out to have an explore but I wasn't able to retrieve Sansa - she remains outright terrified of us. I'm hoping that she'll improve once she's gotten more to play with. Sansa and Arya aren't very active and curious at the moment but I get the feeling that's due to Sansa's terror. As Sansa doesn't do very much, Arya must be pretty unstimulated and bored and so also doesn't do that much. A couple of newbies for them to play with might make all the difference.

The weekend also saw the construction of Rat Palace:

The Savic Royale Suite for the boys. It's a little big for them really but should be a good fit once we have the two new ones. It has great access - the whole front of the cage opens - and is on two floors. The two floors can even be isolated if you wanted to have two cohorts. Will be really handy for cleaning as we can isolate one floor, cleanout the other and then repeat. Alternatively if we have some that don't get along we can do the same. They love it in there, they're are much more active now. We have them up with us in the computer room though, so they may just be more active so they can get my attention and hence receive food. Who knows.

I completed Mass Effect 2 with the above results. In case you were wondering, the deaths were Legion (NOOOO!) and Miranda (shrug). I didn't even realise Miranda had died at first, such is my ambivalence. I've now started Mass Effect 3 and there have been terrible events:

The Earth is under attack by baddies! My goal is to go around the galaxy and recruit enough help to go and sort them out, as well as make a big gun to shoot at them.

Stop bombarding Earth, will you?! Sheesh. I haven't gotten into it that much so far due to lack of time. I have, however, recruited a new doctor as Chakwas died. The new one is French and a bit of a hippy. Her medical advice so far is that I should do nice things to reduce my stress and let my scars heal. Thanks.

Another game played is Dota2.

Above is shown one of the main issues. THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T BLOODY LOAD! Tch. Once I got into the game I chose a druid thing who can transform into a bear as well as having a bear pet. Clumsy to control that.

There is bear-me and bear having a fight. We won the first game once I got the hang of it but I can't see me playing it much. Given that it's basically the same as League of Legends but that has a nicer interface, better art style (if inferior graphics) and is one I'm already used to then this is a bit redundant. Furthermore, Dota2 has annoyingly shouty things like on Smash TV or something. "M-m-m-mmmonster kill!!" and silly gamer language. People are 'pwned'. The actual official parlance says as much. I know that Dota2 is technically more closely aligned to the 'original' version but I don't care enough about such philosophical matters.

That covers some of the things that have happened.

Busy Night

Yes, a busy night! Got home from work at the usual sort of time a bit worn out from a basil hunt. I was going to make bolognese but I had no basil!! This would not do so after work I went a-hunting. Here is a list of local supermarkets and the herbs they had:

Lidl: coriander, parsley
Sainsburys: coriander
Spar: nothing
Co-operative: parsley, coriander

Co-op did have some basil plants but I needed a lot of basil so would have killed it. I didn't want to pay extra for the privilege of throwing a pot in the bin. Walked for ages and ages but still ended up having to go to Asda on the drive home.

Got home, started the bolognese (more on that later), put a flatbread in the oven as a cookingsnack and Fran got to work on a reorganisation. She looked out of the upstairs window and then came down to me with an important alert. THE GARLIC HAS SPROUTED:

I had noticed previously that a bulb of garlic in my garlic pot had begun to sprout, possibly due to the slight damp in that cupboard. As I didn't fancy eating it I decided to break up the bulb and plant the cloves in the hope of reaping a harvest of lots of garlic. The results are above for you to see. Free garlic! Assuming they form into proper bulbs, that is.

While I was out there I took the chance to examine my other crops. SPINACH:

Coming up really nice, should get a decent crop there. We have tonnes of seeds left, despite me planting a silly number in that pot. SAGE:

My herbs aren't exactly thriving but the weather has still had a bit of an edge to it. Hopefully they'll be a bit happier once the cold nights aren't so cold.

So, back to the bolognese. The sauce I did was based on one by Gennaro Contaldo which I previously used for a lasagne. It's extremely simple but also extremely tasty. Modifed it into this:

Chop three onions, however you want, and three-four cloves of garlic. Fry in 125ml olive oil - extra virgin is probably worth it as the oil is contributing to the flavour in this. Once soft add four (yes, four) tins of whole plum tomatoes. Once warmed, roughly tear up a whole supermarket pack of basil.

In the meantime fry up about 900g-1kg of mince. Beef, lamb, pork, doesn't really matter. Once browned add to the sauce. Try not to add much of the fat that has come out of the meat - not much flavour to it and it's just adding unhealth and badtexture.

Simmer for an hour or so. Add water if it's dried down to much. About 45 minutes in, taste a bit and check for seasoning - you will almost certainly need some salt in it to lift the flavour. Black pepper - probably just put a little bit in but add more when you serve. Probably good for an easy six portions.

Optional: add some red wine. Not tried this as it's already rich as hell but I'm planning to. Chilli flakes - probably a good idea. More garlic and basil is probably worth it as they do get slightly lost. Bit of fried smoky bacon or pancetta can't be bad either.

Once that was polished off we continued to reorganise. We decided it was a good idea to move the rats up to the computer room. It's our usual hangout and so the rats weren't quite getting the company they need while they were in the living room downstairs. Moved around various tables, there was some hoovering and the rats are now with us upstairs. It's nice hearing them scuttle around all the time and it's a much better way to keep an eye on their condition.

Sansa seems to be improving - she's still not too brave but is getting better again. It's been a bit of a reset but we're gradually building her confidence back up.

After all that, some Mass Effect 2. Phew!! Just went to get a bit of kit for the main mission and it's now being installed. As a side point, I have a new crew member named Legion. Teehee, he's great. I now have him and Zaeed, two killing machines.

Zaeed was entertaining me by using the line, "I shit you not" when telling one of his stories.

Now I'm back to getting more crew stuff so I guess there's something that has to happen before I can continue with the main storyline. Think I only have the Jacob and Legion story missions left - I don't know what Legion's one is yet as he's only just asked to speak to me and I had to get to bed. It's getting exciting!

Tonight is going to be an EVE Online night. Can't say too much, it's a bit hush-hush.

Mapping

I just realised that I'd forgotten to actually update a site with a new map I made to replace one that was no longer accurate. I attempted to make it look a bit more professional, sort of succeeded even if it's still not quite as I'd like it:

Though annoyingly, I now notice that it becomes illegible once reduced to the size on the website. BAH!