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When my computer breaks two things at once
Well, the liquid cooler on my desktop finally broke. This was an a question of "when" and not "if" after Seth's cooler failed in spectacular fashion last year. Although he's swapped out a couple of GPUs since, we have the exact same basic setup. He tends to stress out his PC rather more frequently than I do, so things that break on his rig are ( Read more... ) -
How to tell my cat from your cat, someone else's cat and those cats over there
Dorian, on pizza
"Pizza is a bread with food on top that we pick off."
Dorian, on sandwiches
"A sandwich is food between two slices of bread. You can eat one side and I can eat the other."
Dorian, on birds in gravy
"I like bird. Give me bird. Is that cream sauce? I'll just run off with this mushroom now."
Dorian, on definitely-not-cat-food popcorn
Seth: * ( Read more... ) -
Crafting and gathering in FFXIV-the closest thing to old-style MMOs
One of my favourite activities in MMOs is gathering and crafting. I suspect this is mostly because I am terrible at crafting in real life, and outside of my stabs at gardening, not really the gathering type either. Most MMOs offer crafting systems as an afterthought-since everyone offers at least something basic, they stop at the basics. Usually, ( Read more... ) -
The little apocalyptic tamagotchi game you never thought you needed
We're big fans of Nippon Ichi Software games in this house. So when word came in last year that NIS might be having funding trouble, followed by the delayed release of Labyrinth of Galleria (sequel to my favourite game of 2018), we immediately gave a hard stare at NIS's library of weird, inexplicable and often slightly macabre titles to see what we ( Read more... ) -
Lamb and pomegranate stew
When Seth asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I asked for something I've wanted for several years now: an enameled dutch oven. The gold standard for an enameled dutch oven is of course Le Creuset-which produces sturdy heirloom pieces at unapologetically heirloom prices. It happened that Amazon Prime Day shook free a nice wide ( Read more... ) -
A totally unscientific, non-empirical quantification of our safety
Last week, I got a text from my mother telling me to stock up food and water before the election. It was not what I expected to be told a week before the US election. Actually, my first thought was, "What are they saying about us on the Murdoch-owned telly in Australia?" Australia took its lockdown seriously, after all. When I spoke to my family ( Read more... ) -
Only so much agreeing to disagree can happen
The last week before the 2020 US Election is a cloud of nervous energy. Every presidential election is important, but even in the some-evils-are-better-than-others race, the implications of a second Trump term are utterly terrifying. For me, the nervousness is both ways. I am watching the worries of my husband, someone who faithfully votes whenever ( Read more... ) -
A strange and dark time (announcing the publication of Finches)
Today I saw a painting of a derelict house against a setting sun. The whole thing was oranges and reds, framed by trees in full autumn plumage. Except this wasn't a painting. It was the charred frame of a burnt house, surrounded by burning trees shaking in the wind. The sun was shimmering in the background because it was veiled in smoke. All of ( Read more... ) -
Wins and cherries
Fixed Seth's desktop. Turned out it wasn't the thermal paste, his Corsair water cooler wasn't working and probably hadn't been working right for some time. What probably happened was that enough water had evaporated out of the tubes so it wasn't pumping correctly anymore. Pre-pandemic times, this would usually mean that we would look up benchmarks ( Read more... ) -
Persona 2: Innocent Sin - They really don't make games like these anymore
About 20 years ago, I impressed a boy online by saying I had also played this weird Japanese RPG called Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. We had both been blown away by how different it was from the fantasy RPGs we'd seen up to that point, how strange the art style was and what a surreal horror story it came out to be. At the end, we bonded over both ( Read more... )